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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.
This is wonderful to read as a nurse that wore my cap with pride and some part of me misses it. I miss it because it always distinguished nurses from everyone else in health care.
I am a little frustrated because I tried to read the whole article but could not get past the first page it ends “it represents”. Help.