Health and medicine cannot be understood without considering the role of nurses, both as professionals and as working women. In India, unlike other countries, nurses have suffered an exceptional degree of neglect at the hands of state, a situation that has been detrimental to the quality of both rural and urban health care. Charting the history of the development of nursing in India over 100 years, "Indian Sisters "examines the reasons why nurses have so consistently been sidelined and excluded from health care governance and policymaking.

The book challenges the routine suggestion that...