St. Luke's Hospital (New York, N.Y.). School of Nursing

The St. Luke’s Hospital Training School for Nurses opened in 1888 with six students enrolled in a two-year training program. The School’s history, however, predates that opening, tracing its roots to the Sisterhood of the Holy Communion that Anne Ayres, the first Sister, in concert with the Rev. William Augustus Muhlenberg, DD, founded in 1845. The Sisterhood – the first protestant sisterhood in the United States - was established to assist with the ministry of the Episcopal Church of the Holy Communion (established in 1844).

Ayres, an Englishwoman employed as a governess to Mary Muhlenberg Roger’s children at the time, heard Muhlenberg preach on the subject of the blessedness of a life of total self-dedication to God, for men and women. At that prompting, she felt the stirrings of a call and approached Muhlenberg to discuss it. She was formally consecrated to the ministry by him in November of 1845 and was soon joined by a few like-minded women. Desiring to differentiate between their religious formation and Roman Catholic religious women, or nuns, they chose to call themselves a Sisterhood. They were a voluntary group, taking no permanent vows, and they took on responsibility for running the parish school and caring for the parish’s sick poor.

In 1853, in anticipation of building a Hospital, the sisters opened an infirmary in a house adjacent to the Church building (fondly referred to it as “the Infant St. Luke’s”). When the construction of the Hospital’s building on West 54th Street at Fifth Avenue was finished in 1858, infirmary patients were transferred there, as the Hospital’s first “guests.”

At the new Hospital, Ayres became the House Mother in charge of both nursing and nurse training, and housekeeping services. Daily care on the ward was directed by a Sister who supervised the work of students and paid nurses. But as the number of patients increased and medical care became more complex, and as applicants to the Sisterhood decreased, that arrangement was no longer sustainable. Laywomen, who functioned essentially as assistants to the Sisters, were hired, but in time, that system, too, became inadequate.

When Muhlenberg died in 1877, Sister Anne retired. Shortly after that, the nursing and housekeeping staffs separated into their own departments and nurses who had trained under the Sisterhood took charge of the nursing staff. Acknowledging the desirability of well-educated nurses, several hospitals in the City established nursing schools as early as the late 1870s, allowing St. Luke’s to employ professionally trained nurses. In 1888, the St. Luke’s Board of Managers decided to establish St. Luke’s Hospital Training School for Nurses, fulfilling an objective of the Hospital’s Act of Incorporation: “A further object of the Society [of St. Luke’s Hospital] shall be the instructing and training of suitable persons in the art of nursing.…” The head of the nursing department became the director, and principal teacher, of the Training School.

Regarding the school’s opening on July 2, 1888 the Board noted, “A carefully digested system of teaching and practice of the art of nursing has been introduced from which excellent results are to be anticipated…. The [six] young women who have joined the school are enthusiastic in their calling and faithful in their work. “

Students did not enter in classes at a set date at first, but individually or in small groups, according to the needs of the Hospital at the time. Instruction took place primarily on the Hospital wards, although lectures, recitations, and examinations on practical points of nursing were given from time to time. Students were graded on their performances, and at the end of a two-year course of study were awarded a diploma and pin. By 1893, as plans to build a new, larger hospital were moving forward, forty-two nurses had graduated.

In 1896, St. Luke’s moved to Morningside Heights, to West 113th Street between Amsterdam Avenue and Morningside Drive. The nursing staff and students were housed in the Vanderbilt Pavilion, commonly referred to as ‘the nurses’ residence’, (a gift of Cornelius Vanderbilt, a St. Luke’s Board member between 1875-1899). At the new location, the training period increased from two to three years, and soon after, an obstetric nursing affiliation with the New York Infant Asylum was added, as was a course in the operating room for selected students. Textbooks and mannequins were introduced. In 1897, the Alumnae Association was organized. Its incorporation came in 1898, with these objectives:

• to promote the interests of St. Luke’s Hospital Training School for Nurses;
• to raise the standards of nursing generally, to cultivate social intercourse among the Alumnae of said school;
• to assist the members of such corporation obtaining professional employment;
• to aid them in promoting and protecting their rights and interests;
• to provide a fund for the benefit of sick, infirm or disabled graduates of said school.

The curriculum continued to evolve in keeping with advances in medicine and nursing. As course instruction increased, so, too, did the nursing faculty and the length of the training period. In 1905 the School was approved for registration with the Regents of the University of the State of New York, demonstrating that it was graduating well educated nurses.

In 1917, to fill the gaps left by enlistment of nurses into World War I service, forty additional probationers were admitted to the Training School. In order to make room for these students in the Vanderbilt Pavilion, graduate nurses were offered a room allowance to live outside the Hospital. At the close of the war, a survey done by the Alumnae Association shows that 197 graduates were engaged in war service in 12 countries, and 48 graduates were enrolled in the St. Luke’s unit of Red Cross Home Defense Nurses.

In the following years an entrance fee for students was instituted, hours on duty were shortened, and course lectures in mental and nervous diseases, communicable, skin, and venereal diseases were added to the curriculum. Attention to the physical condition of the students improved with regular chest x-rays and immunizations against typhoid fever, smallpox, scarlet fever, and diphtheria. The fourth floor in the Travers Pavilion, which was erected in 1911 to house outpatient services and dormitories for ‘servants,’ was turned over entirely for instruction of students and faculty offices.

In 1921, the course of study was shortened to two and a half years. The system of theoretical instruction was reorganized in 1928. An education director was appointed, and a teaching dietitian and a full-time instructor in the sciences were hired. In the Hospital, a program of employing graduate nurses for general duty, was instituted, first on the private floors and then on the wards. At the same time “ward helpers” were introduced. These women performed non-nursing duties previously done by the nurses: brass polishing, caring for the patients’ flowers, sorting and storing linen as it came from the laundry, carrying food trays, etc.

In the early 1930s, student entrance fees rose from $25 to $50, and the training period was again extended to three years. Specialty affiliations were added to the curriculum. For example, a three-month course in psychiatric nursing at the Bloomingdale Hospital in White Plains, New York, (later named “The New York Hospital, Westchester Division”) or at the Neurological Institute, New York City; and three months in communicable disease nursing at Willard Parker Hospital in Manhattan or a two-month course with field work at the Henry Street Settlement, New York City. In the later 1930’s the National League for Nursing Education began nation-wide accreditation of nursing schools, and St. Luke’s Hospital Training School for Nursing was accredited by that organization.

On December 16, 1937, the Eli White Memorial Residence opened as a new, modern residence for nurses. Erected at a cost of $1,600,000, it was a memorial to the late Eli White, a New York City merchant, out of a bequest given by his daughter, Mary Ann Fitzgerald. Facing south on 114th Street, the residence extended through to 115th and offered 355 rooms for students, graduates, and faculty. A tunnel connected the residence to the Hospital for use in inclement weather. Health and social-physical education directors were added to the staff of the school by the end of the 1930s.

At its March 28, 1938 meeting the Board of Managers decided, in keeping with current nomenclature, to change the name of the School from the “St. Luke’s Hospital Training School for Nurses” to the “St. Luke’s Hospital School of Nursing.” At the same time, as a new Directress was taking the reins of the School, the name of that title also changed to “Director.” In February 1942, the Alumnae Association followed suit and changed its name to “The Alumnae Association of the St. Luke’s Hospital School of Nursing.”

During World War II, many students enrolled in the United States Public Health Service’s Cadet Nurse Corps, and throughout the war hundreds of alumnae participated in government nursing services. The Class of 1947 published the School’s first yearbook, Triennium, dedicated to the Second Evacuation Hospital Unit, composed of doctors and nurses recruited from St. Luke’s Hospital that served in the European theater. Student fees increased to $350 for the three-year training period; a student loan fund was developed and supported by graduates of the School.

In 1953, an obstetric affiliation began at St. Luke’s Hospital’s newly incorporated Woman’s Hospital Division. In 1954, the Hospital’s nursing department and the nursing school were reorganized into two separate departments - the School of Nursing and the Nursing Service – both under one director of nursing. This division was solidified in 1959, when each department received its own director and, for the first time, students were no longer on the staffing roster of the Hospital. Following that, a two-week tour of duty (later extended to a four-week tour) in the recovery room was added to the students’ rotations, and the privileges for all students were liberalized, including the marriage policy. By the late 1950’s only one class was admitted each year and a student received her cap after ten months instead of after six.

By the early 1960’s the faculty and staff of the School had grown to 30. Following tradition, freshmen were still introduced to ward duty soon after entering the School, with their on-duty work correlated with classroom instruction. Junior year focused on obstetrics, the operating room, pediatrics, and psychiatry. The senior year brought night and evening duty; advanced medical-surgical nursing; special surgery, i.e., orthopedics; urology; and ear, nose and throat; the emergency room; and the outpatient department.

In 1957, the School created the Muhlenberg School of Practical Nursing, an 18-month program designed to train licensed practical nurses. However, the program was not successful and was closed in 1959.

In April 1972, due to changes in the profession and the growing availability of four-year bachelor’s degree programs, the decision to phase out the School was announced. The School’s last class was accepted in 1972 and graduated in 1974. During its more than 80 years of existence, the St. Luke’s Hospital School of Nursing educated 4,000 graduate nurses.

Local

Alumnae Association of the St. Luke’s Hospital School of Nursing, St. Luke’s Hospital Historical Review http://www.slhson.org/
History of the St. Luke’s Hospital Training School for Nurses, New York. Fiftieth Anniversary 1888-1938. St. Luke’s Alumnae Association, 1938.
Sister Anne: Pioneer in Women’s Work by Harry Boone Porter, Jr., The National Council, New York, 1960.
Minutes to the Board of Managers Meetings from March 1938.