James Webb will be big, and it will have the major advantage of operating beyond the Earth's atmosphere, but astronomers are coming up with some incredible ways to make our telescopes on the ground ever more sensitive.
Two things strike me whenever I teach my undergraduate seminar “Women in American Medicine.” First, my students, many who have medical ambitions of their own, are shocked by the well-documented history of the medical establishment’s discrimination against women, from actively excluding midwives from the bedside in the 19th century to enforcing the criminalization of abortion in the 20th. Second, they are even more surprised that the history of nursing is much more complicated than one might imagine given depictions of nurses in popular culture.
Images of nurses as selfless ministering angels predominated in the 19th and early 20th centuries and were replaced during World War II with representations of sexy pin-up nurses as seen in novels, film, and television. During this period, nursing as a field professionalized and struggled to balance its legacy as gender-stereotyped “women’s work” with a commitment to scientific training, technical competency, and authority at the bedside. In this context, nurses had the opportunity to leverage cultural associations between femininity and caregiving to pursue paid employment. But, as members of a feminized profession, they also had to confront grueling labor demands, chronic undercompensation, and devaluation within medical hierarchies.
Where A Herring Famine excels is in poems that, alongside their craft and guile, wear their heart on their sleeve.
I unhook two fingers down my throat
and here they come back again with their
new and brave ideas.