FROM DOROTHY KEENEY
Dorothy Keeney, MA, BS, RN, worked for 20 years as a school nurse in the Boston Public Schools, which gave her firsthand knowledge of the topic for her book, The Untold Story of Annie McKay and the Boston Public School Nurses, 1905-1988: The Formation of the Massachusetts School Nurse Organization.
“I spent many years researching the Boston school nurses history, only to have my book launch coincide with the pandemic lockdown,” Dorothy wrote to Eastman Living. “Readers can readily see how they managed the 1917-1919 Spanish flu, contagious diseases such as diphtheria, scarlet fever, and many polio epidemics that occurred during the 20th Century.”
Dorothy, who is the Boston School Nurse Historian, has been a member of the Eastman community for 40 years and, for several years while she was writing this book, she was part of a writing group that met monthly in White River Junction, VT. “This group kept me motivated and on target, so I was lucky to find them,” she said.
Dorothy explained that this book tells the story of Annie McKay, Boston’s first school nurse in 1905, and the early Boston school nurses, prior to becoming the professionals that we know today. Boston selected the South End, one of its poorest districts at that time, as the first site of their pilot program to reduce a 13 percent absenteeism rate in the public schools. The results of the pilot program were so successful in containing student absenteeism due to illness that the Boston School Committee decided in 1907 to hire 34 nurses and a nursing supervisor to service Boston’s elementary schools. Boston was the third city in the U.S. to deploy this type of program. The book expands the horizons of school nursing and healthcare history and engages related fields such as child labor, women’s employment, economic history, gender enquiry, and desegregation.
Dorothy’s book is available for purchase via Amazon or her website: http://bostonschoolnursing.com.
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