False Dawn: The Rise and Decline of Public Health Nursing

Since its initial publication in 1989 by Garland Press, Karen Buhler Wilkerson’s False Dawn: The Rise and Fall of Public Health Nursing remains the definitive work on the creation, work, successes, and failures of public health nursing in the United States. False Dawn explores and answers the provocative question: why did a movement that became a significant vehicle for the delivery of comprehensive health care to individuals and families fail to reach its potential? Through carefully researched chapters, Wilkerson details what she herself called the ‘rise and fall’ narrative of public health nursing: rising to great heights in its patients’ homes in the struggle to control infectious diseases, assimilate immigrants, and tame urban areas – only to flounder during the later growth of hospitals, significant immigration restrictions, and the emergence of chronic diseases as endemic in American society.