10/27/2025
You are invited!
Healthcare has shut down the federal government, forcing attention to this issue. Please join us for a new book discussion about the inequities of rural healthcare and creating the nurse practitioner:
• Ketchum on Oct 30
• Gonzaga University Nov 11
Today there are nearly 400,000 licensed nurse practitioners in America, and the profession has expanded internationally. Marie Osborn ARNP is history's first-licensed Nurse Practitioner. This is her story and the story of a community that helped create the Nurse Practitioner profession to help remedy America's rural healthcare crisis.
The newly released book, Moving Mountains (Caxton Press), centers on Marie, Idaho's first Nurse Practitioner. At age 40, this RN, mother of five and IBM executive's wife, increasingly upset by the inequities in rural healthcare, told the head of the Idaho Hospital Association that someone needed to do something. Within a year, Marie was a sole healthcare provider covering 6,000-square-miles of Idaho's Sawtooth-Salmon River country on 24/7 call, backed by a growing cadre of volunteer EMTs.
For the next 30 years, to save lives in caring for her patients far from hospitals, Marie did what she had to do . . . and forcing fundamental changes in healthcare. At 4 foot 11 inches, Marie did not set out to change the world, but she did. As one of her former patients, singer-song writer Carole King, noted,
"It's not easy to get out folks in nearly 6,000 square miles of rural Custer Country in Idaho, and it's a lot more difficult in winter. I don't think it ever occurred to Marie, who was small of stature and big of heart, that she couldn't do something because she wasn't a man. Marie just did it."
KETCHUM
• Date: Oct 30
• Time (MT): 5:30 PM - 6:30 PM
• Where: The Community Library, 415 Spruce Ave in Ketchum
• Live stream (if you can't join us in person): https://vimeo.com/event/5327451
• More about the event: https://thecommunitylibrary.libcal.com/event/15106619
