Nurse's Secret

New York, 1880s. Una, a young woman who lives by her wits and by deceit, slips away from the police by securing a place in the training school at Bellevue Hospital. The school's early history is little known, and the murders that seem to follow Una refuse to let her leave the city's harsh streets behind.

Bellevue was the first school of its kind in the United States and was built on the nursing principles of Florence Nightingale. At a time when nurses were generally regarded as untrained and unskilled, the school values discipline, intellect and moral character, and it admits only young women from respectable families.

Una has little patience for her poised classmates or the doctors' constant demands. Still, the hardships of her life on the streets have prepared her for the wounds and diseases she meets on the wards, and slowly she forges friendships and a stronger sense of her own worth. Just as she begins to find her place, her doubts about a patient's death threaten to expose who she really is, and she must decide whether to protect herself or reveal her identity to help others.

Author Amanda Skenandore, who brings medical expertise to the book, also wrote The Second Life of Mirielle West. Nurse's Secret traces the development of modern nursing and the grim realities of nineteenth-century medicine, told through the eyes of its central heroine.