Surely, ‘Tis Not an Easy Cap to Satisfy…A Nurse’s 1929 Meditation on Nursing Caps

Photo from otisarchives4, via Flickr. otisarchives4/Flickr.

By Karen Roush, AJN clinical managing editor

Though the nursing cap went by the wayside years ago, this beautifully written essay by a nurse about her cap, published in AJN in April, 1929, struck me as a metaphor for many things—nursing itself chief among them. And though the wearing of a cap may have changed, what this author expressed in 1929 about nursing hasn’t: “sympathy without sentimentality; broad understanding without cynicism; charity without weakness.”

The opening paragraphs are below, but the entire essay, “My Cap,” will be free until next week on the AJN Web site.

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