Auction Name: 2026 March 21 Space Exploration Showcase Auction

Lot Number: 71208

Shortcut to Lot: HA.com/33172*71208

Dee O'Hara Signed Book: Astronauts' Nurse. (New York: A Rutledge Book by Thomas Nelson, 1965). By Virginia B. McDonnell, R.N. Signed on the title page in blue ink: "Best wishes to the Norwich Family/ Dee O'Hara/ Astronauts' Nurse". Hardbound in a dust jacket, octavo, 126 pages, illustrated. Good.

Dee O'Hara's The Astronauts' Nurse is significant on several distinct levels: as a primary-source memoir of the Mercury program, as a rare female-authored perspective within early NASA culture, and as documentation of the human infrastructure behind America's first astronauts. Its importance is contextual rather than technical, it does not reshape the historiography of spaceflight operations, but it materially enriches our understanding of the Mercury era at the interpersonal level. The book is a firsthand account from the nurse assigned exclusively to the original Mercury Seven beginning in 1959. O'Hara was not a peripheral observer; she was embedded in the Astronaut Office ecosystem at a formative stage of NASA's identity.

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