A Nurse for All Seasons

A Nurse for All Seasons is an intellectual and vocational biography of Elizabeth Robinson Scovil entwined with the story of New Brunswick’s Scovil family. Author, Virginia Bliss Bjerkelund presented the story of her mother’s family in the 2020 non-fiction novel, Meadowlands: A Chronicle of the Scovil Family. Elizabeth Scovil (Aunt Bessie) is a featured character in Meadowlands. She was the anchor of the Scovil family from the late 1800s through the early 1930s.

But that is only part of the story. Elizabeth Robinson Scovil made a decision at the age of twenty-nine that warrants a biography. A Nurse for All Seasons is that book.

Unlike many biographies that present the details of their subject’s life in a chronological narrative, A Nurse for All Seasons rolls out a sequence of chapters that individually focus on Elizabeth Scovil’s overlapping careers. She was a pioneer of professional nursing and nursing education. She developed an associated career as the author of highly successful books on the health care and development of children. She was a journalist who was in on the founding of The Ladies’ Home Journal, The American Journal of Nursing, and Canadian Nurse. She was a feminist before feminism was a movement.

Virginia Bliss Bjerkelund is a Maritimer, born in Amherst, Nova Scotia, educated in Fredericton, New Brunswick, followed by nearly 30 years of living in England where she married and brought up a daughter and son, now both retired. She returned to Fredericton, re-married, travelled widely, practiced Social Work, and is active in the cultural life of the city.