I’m backing up to fill in now, because I made this large, poster-sized print about healthcare heroes in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown in 2020 (I am writing now in March 2022). Most of the perSISTERS are 11 x 14 inches, but this one is 18 x 24. I wanted to feature more than one person.

Here is a link to order this online.

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Shuping Wang

In the 1990s, despite threats and violence, Dr. Shuping Wang twice refused to be silent about the unsafe practices and cover-ups at the profitable plasma collection centers in China. About three million poor people regularly sold their blood through Henan’s Plasma Economy Project. One deadly practice: different donors’ blood was mixed together after it was drawn, and, once the plasma was extracted, the remaining mixed blood was reinjected into the donors. As a result, first Hepatitis C and then HIV epidemics killed over one million people. Because Wang spoke out, safety practices were put in place, which reduced profits, but saved the lives of tens of thousands of people. “Being a medical doctor, my primary interest is to my patients and to the public, not to myself. Speaking out cost me my job, my marriage and my happiness at the time, but it also helped save the lives of thousands and thousands of people.” She immigrated to the U.S. in 2001, remarried, and worked as a medical researcher at the University of Utah. She died in 2019.

Lauren Leander

April 20, 2020: pictured in a viral photo on social media, Lauren Leander, a critical care nurse in Arizona, stands in silent counter-protest at a rally against the stay at home order designed to relieve pressure on healthcare services during the COVID-19 pandemic. She was subject to threats and intimidation, but she stood firm. “We were there to be a voice for our patients and the immunocompromised and the people who are sick with COVID that would be out there fighting with us, if they could, asking people to follow the stay at home rules.”

Florence Nightingale

Called both “Lady With the Lamp” and “Lady With the Hammer,” Englishwoman Florence Nightingale was the epitome of the merciful and fierce care-giver. During the Crimean war (1853–56), she used a lamp at night to check on the sick soldiers under her care. She also used a hammer to break down storeroom doors when commanders withheld vital supplies. She saved thousands of lives by insisting on good sanitation and proper hygiene in her hospital, and later in city planning. She was a pioneer in using statistics and information graphics for communicating about public health. She was most influential through her efforts to professionalize the nursing profession as medical care, not simply sanitation work.

Nita Pippins

A retired nurse in Florida, in 1987 Nita Pippins moved to Manhattan to care for her gay son who was dying of AIDS. Originally ashamed of the diagnosis and of her son’s sexuality, she kept the news from her family and friends, and she also felt out of place in the city. She took care of her son for three years as his health failed, and she saw his friends, neighbors, and colleagues decline and perish in that epidemic. Many had been rejected by their families. Her perspective changed when she became a part of her son’s community. After he died she stayed in New York and dedicated herself to AIDS causes. She gave emotional and logistical support to the parents of the afflicted and became a replacement mother to sick men estranged from their families, sometimes holding their hands while they died. Pippins died alone of COVID-19 on Mother’s Day, 2020.

Edna Adan Ismail

Born in 1937, Edna Adan Ismail was the first Somali woman to study in Britain. She returned to Somaliland as its first professionally trained nurse and midwife, where she had to fight to be paid for her work at a government hospital. Eventually she became the first female director of the Ministry of Health in Somalia. When civil war broke out she left her country to work for the World Health Organization in Djibouti, where she helped pass legislation outlawing Female Genital Mutilation (FGM). Later she used her own money to purchase land and, with the help of donors and the Friends of Edna’s Hospital Foundation, she opened Somaliland’s first maternity hospital in 2002. The hospital targeted maternal mortality, which, because of the lack of prenatal care and the complications from FGM, was the leading cause of death among women of reproductive age. The hospital has trained hundreds of midwives and delivered tens of thousands of babies, while also treating people for other health issues. In her 80s, Ismail continues to work hard to save the lives of new mothers and to end FGM.

Sara Josephine Baker

“The way to keep people from dying from disease, it struck me suddenly, was to keep them from falling ill. Healthy people don’t die. It sounds like a completely witless remark, but at that time it was a startling idea. Preventative medicine had hardly been born yet and had no promotion in public health work.”

In 1898 Sara Josephine Baker graduated from medical school and, after working in private practice for a short while, launched a career in public health. She twice helped to track down Mary Mallon, a healthy carrier of typhoid famously called “Typhoid Mary.” Baker was offered an opportunity to reduce mortality rates in Hell’s Kitchen, a New York City slum where 4,500 people were dying each week at the turn of the 19th century. She focused on reducing the 1,500 weekly infant deaths, most of which were caused by poor hygiene and parental ignorance. She pioneered programs to educate mothers and to professionalize the practice of midwifery. She developed techniques to reduce the rate of infant blindness from 300 per year to 3 per year. She made sure that good quality pasteurized milk was available to families and used the public schools to provide health care and nutrition. In 1917, Baker became the first woman to receive a doctorate in public health. Her work prevented the deaths of tens of thousands of children.