Maria Smilios > Quotes

“Missouria took in Mr. Morris’s information and this system of demarcating lives. Maps and lines had defined her entire life. They were drawn throughout history, straightened, elongated, bent up and
down by people who met in town halls and state capitals and now in the federal government. She had spent too many years confined inside those lines, told where to go, when, and for how long. She had come here to change her life, to live as a professional, and to put down new roots.”
― Maria Smilios, The Black Angels: The Untold Story of the Nurses Who Helped Cure Tuberculosis

“Standing there, she gave a final glance at the instruments lying on the different trays: scissors, trocars, and elevators, used for scraping and dissecting bones; retractors, heavy L-shaped instruments for holding back organs and tissues; rongeurs, for gnawing holes in bones; mouth gags and bone cutters and rib cutters, whose tips were molded into shapes that resembled steel beaks.”
― Maria Smilios, The Black Angels: The Untold Story of the Nurses Who Helped Cure Tuberculosis

“Edna never took decisions lightly. She was a woman of few words, a listener, a reader of silences, of the pauses that came between thoughts and ideas. Living in the South, she had learned to decipher absence, fill in the gaps, read smiles and smirks and hand gestures, and then wait for clarity. She would do that now. Take her time, weigh the pros and cons of staying in Savannah and enduring its codes or following the thousands of other migrants and becoming a nurse in a TB hospital. (pg. 26)”
― Maria Smilios, The Black Angels: The Untold Story of the Nurses Who Helped Cure Tuberculosis