Nursing Voices

Thursday, June 28, 2007

Mod Nurse

This post is for Geena from Code Blog because she isn't old enough to recognize this girl . Do you remember this girl's name? She's an actress named Peggy Lipton, and she played Julie Barnes on the Mod Squad. She ran around with two mod guys while solving crimes and saving the world. It was all about peace, love, and doing the right thing. Peggy was the definition of cool. Every girl in my school wanted to be just like Peggy. We wore short skirts, grew our hair long, and begged our parents to let us wear makeup and bleach our hair. Few of us made it to mod status. I know I didn't make the grade. It just wasn't meant to be.

I wonder what mod nurses looked like in the 1960s. I know that they cared about their patients. I've seen some pictures from back then. Nurses wore short dresses, and I don't know how they were able to bend over and make a bed without their undies showing. They wore caps and dreamed of marrying doctors.




Here's a mod looking nurse. She's off duty so she's not wearing her mini nursing uniform. Our mod nurse was just doing her own thing, and then she fell in love. She's dreaming about marrying a doctor.

"When Jacqueline Clarke came from France to nurse at a Yorkshire hospital she had never known any Englishmen except her father. Soon she was to meet two very attractive ones; her farmer-cousin Guy, who ruled over his broad acres from a centuries-old farmhouse, and the distinguished surgeon of whom nurses spoke in awed whispers as “the great Mr. Broderick.”

Guy fell in love and started proposing marriage almost at once, while she wasn’t supposed even to speak to Mr. Broderick — and what a sensation there was when she did! She couldn’t presume to imagine that he would ever give her a serious thought…and yet the idea of him seemed to come persistently between her and Guy."


I giggled when I read the back about the "great Mr. Broderick." I guess he was trying to be cool by not insisting that the nurses call him doctor. That's him looking cool on the bookcover. Look closely at the picture. Is he smoking a joint? I think he looks a little stoned. That's another thing I remember about the 1960s, but that's another story.

Today's nurses have a few thing in common with nurses from the 1960s. We want the best for our patients. It's still all about wanting to do the right thing.


Groovy!

9 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Thanks for the explanation! She's kinda cute. :-)

7:49 PM  
Blogger Forgotten Blue Line said...

Leave the doc alone, he may have a serious illness and thats why he smoking a J : ) Gotta love your patients other wise they come back with lawyers.

11:47 PM  
Blogger Bill Fullerton said...

Cute post. According to my wife (Hunter/Bellevue '72) the short skirts could be a challenge.

I had no problem with them. But then my perspective as a VA patient was a bit different.

Not meaning to be a downer, just a reminder that a lot of nurses during in that era were wearing olive-drab fatigues in Vietnam.

8:47 AM  
Blogger poody said...

I think Mr B looks kind of creepy! I loved The Mod Squad! I so wanted my hair to look like hers but alas I have curly hair. A real bane in the 60's I tell ya!

10:40 AM  
Blogger Smalltown RN said...

I couldn't imagine having to nurse in a short skirt...I mean I used to wear dress uniform but it was at my knees.....now it is scrubs....and yes I do remember the mod squad...loved that show....I wasn't nursing then, so I can't even imagine what a mod nurse would have looked like

4:27 AM  
Blogger Labor Nurse, CNM said...

I was looking at that picture thinking it was Michelle Phillips from the Mama's and the Papa's. Oh well.

10:19 PM  
Blogger Susan from the Pacific Northwest said...

The woman who plays Karen on The Office is Peggy Liptons daughter.

1:21 AM  
Blogger Mother Jones RN said...

SRR: I didn't know that about the girl who plays Karen on The Office. Thanks for the info.

8:35 AM  
Blogger Antigonos said...

I was a nursing student in the mid60s, and our uniform dresses and aprons came to well below the knee. So much so that one of my classmates laboriously shortened hers. The next day, at inspection (yes, we had daily uniform inspection which included CLEAN SHOELACES), the instructor told her her skirts were too short. "I have low knees" my classmate said, with a perfectly straight face.

8:15 AM  

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