Roosevelt Hospital School of Nursing records

Little was recorded of Roosevelt Hospital’s nursing services for some years following the hospital’s opening in 1871. It is known that sleeping quarters for nurses existed adjacent to the women’s and the men’s wards, which were staffed by male nursing attendants. The women’s nurses and any female patients were under the direction of the hospital’s Matron.

By 1873, nursing schools were established at both Bellevue Hospital and New York Post-Graduate Hospital. By 1894, an affiliation with New York Post-Graduate Hospital brought nursing students to Roosevelt for a short-term rotation as part of their practical training. In those early years, the typical staffing for a thirty-bed ward consisted of a head nurse, two assistants and one or more probationers whose chief duties were cleaning and bed making. Instruction was strictly practical and conducted on the wards supplemented by one formal class each week. The study curriculum consisted of the principles of bedside nursing and Materia Medica. The duty periods were twelve hours long beginning at 7a.m.

The hospital continued to expand patient services and build new facilities, such as the McLane and Syms operating theatres (1890; 1892). The Syms Theater had nurses dedicated to that service with living quarters on site. As more staff doctors demanded the presence of trained nurses, the Roosevelt Trustees considered the need to establish a training school for nurses. The idea was stymied, however, because there were no living quarters to house students. When the Out-Patient Pavilion opened in 1885, it had been constructed to allow for the addition of five more stories and in 1894, the Trustees decided that it was time to build these additions. By 1896, the new floors were completed; two were designated as nursing student housing and thus, the Roosevelt Hospital Training School for Nurses was established. On November 16, 1896, the first class of 24 students and 7 probationers was enrolled.

The aims of the school were: 1) to enable young women to acquire a knowledge of nursing that would place them in the front rank of skilled nurses; 2) to make them self-supporting after graduation; 3) to provide better nursing care for the patients through intelligent, well-educated women; and 4) to prepare students to train others by going into other institutions as teachers. Students accepted for admission were required to be 23 to 35 years of age; single; in sound health; have the equivalent of a grammar-school education; be adaptable to new conditions; have a readiness to make personal sacrifices; and have an equable tempera-ment. The probationary term was two months. At the end of that time, if successful, the student received her nurse’s cap and seven dollars monthly allowance.

In the first decade of the school, the three-year curriculum expanded to include anatomy, obstetrics, dietetics, and massage. Lectures by interns and visiting medical staff speaking on their specialties became a regular feature of the program. These improvements in instruction allowed the program to register with the Department of Education under the New York State Nurse Registration Act in 1905.

By 1911 enrollment was topping one hundred students and the need for more student housing was answered by the completion of a nurses’ residence at the end of that year. In the 1920s new courses in public health, psychiatry, and communicable diseases were added to the curriculum. A Supervisor of Wards position was added to strengthen the practical bedside instruction, as did the addition of graduate nurses to the general duty and teaching staff. A preliminary term of six months was instituted; after which the student received her cap and was permitted to wear the powder blue uniform with the double white strips that identified a Roosevelt Hospital student nurse. Note that by 1926 the name, “Roosevelt Hospital School of Nursing,” was being used in annual reports and any official business.

In the 1930s and early 1940s, the selection of student nurses became more rigid and the content of the curriculum more exacting. The duty rotation was cut back to an eight-hour day from the original twelve hours. Additional instructors and supervisors were added to the medical, surgical, and pediatric nursing areas, and in the science courses and public health nursing. As WWII developed overseas, the Hospital instituted disaster teams for emergency services in the event of a home-front attack and the student nurses gained experience by participating in these teams.

A new wing was added onto the Nurses’ Residence in 1955 with additional living quarters, study and lecture rooms, and laboratory and library facilities. In 1956 the nursing school was separated from the nursing service. One of the results of these improvements was the school’s full accreditation, in July 1957, by the National League for Nursing.

The growth of the school soon out-paced the facilities, which were quickly becoming inadequate. In 1960 an Ad Hoc Committee was formed to consider the future of the school and how to best meet its needs, were it to continue. The outcome of this study was a decision to collapse the three-year program into two years, the framework for which was developed by the nursing faculty. This proposal was approved by New York State Department of Education in 1962, and it received a commendation for its original plan.

The new program was put into effect in September 1963 and was followed by a fifty per cent increase in applications, credited to the change in the length of program, and possibly the renovation and refurnishing of the oldest section of nurses’ quarters completed that year. Another factor may have been additional improvements in the practical training, such as the availability of training in psychiatric nursing on site in the newly opened psychiatry unit in the Tower Building, instead of traveling to New York Hospital’s Westchester Division. Another change for the nursing school in the 1960s was the entrance of the first male student in 1968, graduating with the class of 1969. Three men graduated with the class of 1972, and five with the class of 1974.

By the mid-1960s professional nursing organizations were calling for nursing programs to be removed from hospitals and placed solely in the hands of academic institutions. In addition, medical advances were increasing the responsibilities being delegated to the nursing staff, requiring more educational experience, and the costs of running a training program were increasingly unsupportable by hospitals. By the early 1970s the Hospital was actively investigating participation in baccalaureate programs with Columbia’s College of Physicians and Surgeons and John Jay College. The program with Columbia did not move forward, and it is unclear if the proposal for John Jay College was accepted either. In 1973 the Board of Trustees, upon the advice of its Executive Committee, decided to accept no new students and to close the School of Nursing with the graduation of the class of 1974, “so all enrolled students receive the education they expected upon entering the school.”

Over its seventy-eight years of nursing education, the Roosevelt Hospital School of Nursing trained 2,384 students in the profession under eight Directresses of Nursing: Sarah G. Whitney (1896-1898); Mary Alexander Samuel (1898-1910); Isabel Douglas Richmond (1910-1930); A. Isabelle Byrne (1930-1946); Evelyn O. Fraser (1946-1954); Adelma Moot (1954-1955); Helen Parker (1955-1956); Eileen O. Scott (1956-1974).