Medicine for Nurses

The long-running general-medicine textbook written by W. Gordon Sears for nurse-training curricula. Carried through many editions from its first appearance in the 1940s, it was a standard ward reference covering the common presenting conditions, their pathophysiology, and the nursing observations and interventions they call for.

Written in the period when Britain was building out state-funded nurse training around the new National Health Service, the text follows the syllabus of the preliminary and Part I State Registered Nurse examinations of the day. Chapters cover infectious disease, cardiovascular and respiratory medicine, gastrointestinal and renal conditions, endocrine and metabolic disorders, and the neurological presentations a probationer might first encounter on the wards, with the language pitched at the bedside rather than the medical-student lecture theatre.

Sears's three-book set — Medicine for Nurses paired with Anatomy and Physiology for Nurses and Materia Medica for Nurses — formed a single Arnold curriculum block widely adopted by hospital schools of nursing through the 1950s and 1960s. Library copies bearing reprint stamps into the late 1970s indicate continued use in nurse-tutor practice well after the original editions appeared.