Black Velvet Band weaves together the experiences of three women, their friends, and their colleagues, during one of the most critical periods of 20th century American history. Nursing student Alice Denny and her classmates face the pleasures and pains that young women like them endured as they prepared to become registered nurses, one of the first professions established for women early in the 20th century. Mary Keith R. N., Superintendent of General Hospital in a major American city, aided by her colleagues and close friends, guides her institution through choppy waters. A severe drain of nurses, physicians, and adjunct staff, restrictions imposed by the Federal Government, and demands of Board members and city officials complicate the day-to-day pressures that fulfilling her institution's mission demands. Sophia Palmer R. N., as the district's American Red Cross nurse recruiter, culls through the area's female population seeking every willing trained nurse to serve in stateside training camps and overseas military hospitals. Then she teaches classes to teach nursing skills to untrained women in an effort to fill vacancies left in general hospital nursing staffs. Suddenly in the fall of 1918, a toxic blanket of Spanish influenza reaches America's shores and spreads quickly through its cities. More deadly than the weapons of war, the disease paralyzes communities just as it prostrates its victims. General hospitals are on the edge of foundering. Nursing students, the epidemic's most vulnerable victims, face sickness, death and exhaustion daily. The hospital superintendent must find rooms and staff enough to fulfill her institution's pledge to accept every sick individual and every accident victim that needs medical help. The Red Cross nurse recruiter must organize a network of willing but untrained volunteers to fight the disease throughout diverse city neighborhoods, at hastily established emergency hospitals, and in abandoned mansions. In reviewing real-time events, this fictive history novel, built on a thoroughly researched, factual framework and portraying actual historic individuals, seeks to discover the heroes whose intuition and creative teamwork allowed hospitals and communities to endure during the crisis. The goal of the novel's fictive history approach is to give documented history a heartbeat and the real historic players in the drama personalities and emotional responses to the challenges they face. Human themes give depth to the characters: heroism and hope counteract annoyance and anger; pride that comes from successfully meeting a challenge head on replaces a sense of frustration over conditions that cannot be altered; humor and love counterbalance devastating feelings of helplessness and grief that the Spanish influenza pandemic created. Images of the individuals and the sites portrayed in the novel as well as a chronology of real-time events appear in the novel's appendix.
About the Author: Teresa K. (Terry) Lehr has been researching and writing about the history of health care, particularly in Rochester, N.Y., since 1990 when she became Assistant Curator in the Baker-Cederberg Museum and Archives. The unwritten stories she found among the documents in that repository became an obsession which lasted throughout an eighteen-year hiatus when she served as a full-time lecturer in the Department of English at the College at Brockport, N. Y. Upon her retirement in 2011, Terry brought to completion another long-term project, the transcription and abridgment of a collection of Civil War letters, which she had embarked upon with a coeditor colleague in 1994. It was at this juncture that Terry decided that factual history didn't satisfy her enough. She wanted to see the actors in actions and hear the emotion in their voices. So she decided to augment documented information with social context details and with elements that fiction writing involves. Like Black Velvet Band, her first history-plus work of fiction, The Great Tonsil Massacre, is based on a 1920, 1921 public health initiated, promoted, and supported by George Eastman and other Rochester industrialists and mercantilists. Most of its characters, however, are imagined creations of ordinary people affected by the decisions of powerful leaders. That novella, she would agree, is an example of historical fiction. But because Black Velvet Band is tied so tightly to a factual time framework and involves actual historic persons, she calls this new novel a work of fictive history. Other books published by Teresa K. Lehr include: To Serve the Community. (1997) A sesquicentennial history of Rochester General Hospital. Let the art of Medicine Flourish (2000) A centennial history of the Rochester Academy of Medicine. Lighting the Way (2002) A centennial history of St. John's Home. For Those Who Shaped Our Heritage (2004) A centennial history of the Fairport Baptist Home. Drawn to Tradition, Challenged by Change (2006) A sesquicentennial history of Christ Church, Rochester. Emerging Leader (2012) Co-edited with Philip Gerber, PHD. The Civil War Letters of Col. Carter Van Vleck to His Wife. The Great Tonsil Massacre (2014) A historical novella about a public health project in Rochester, N. Y. 1920, 1921.