In honor of National Nurses Week, we’re highlighting the fascinating stories behind some of our historic cover photos. Enjoy!

Issue Cover Notes

This is one of many patriotic parades in which nurses participated. The location is Fifth Avenue near Rockefeller Center, and the banner hanging from the building or just one to buy bonds. The nurses are wearing their blue and white pinstripe to put a force. The New York training school for female nurses attached to Bellevue Hospital was founded in May, 1873. It was the first school of nursing in the United States established on the Florence nightingale principles of organization. So revolutionary was the concept of the trained nurse that Bellevue nursing students and graduates were sent as representatives to the Philadelphia exhibition in 1876 for the nation’s centennial celebration. Bellevue graduates founded many of the countries in nursing schools, and served in the Spanish-American war, World War I and II, Korean and Vietnam wars.

---

Until the middle of the twentieth century, women with resources gave birth at home, with a personal physician or midwife on hand.  It was only the indigents and immigrants who went to the hospital to have their babies. Bellevue’s Emergency Pavilion was established in 1877 by the Nursing Schools Board of Managers for “women taken in labor on the streets.”  This pavilion was a small, two-story, converted firehouse at 223 East 26th Street (now a nondescript Department of Sanitation building). During their required six-week rotation there, physicians were permitted no contact with the main hospital several blocks away to prevent spread of puerperal fever to the new mothers.

The cover photo shows student nurses caring for babies in their bassinets (c. 1915). The students were advised by the Board of Managers to watch the babies carefully when they were distributed to their mothers at feeding time since there was a high incidence of infanticide.  The Emergency Pavilion closed in 1935 and all cases were transferred to the newly built F&G pavilion at the main hospital campus. New licensing laws and the emerging field of obstetrics for doctors heated up the politics of childbirth, and Bellevue’s School of Midwifery closed its doors that same year. (The F&G pavilion was replaced in 1973 with the “New Bellevue” building, where all in-patients are currently housed.)

---

The cover photo, c. 1918, depicts the Bellevue medical staff in Vichy, France, enjoying a light moment in the midst of the war.

With the outbreak of World War I and the subsequent entry of the United States into the conflict, medical professionals at Bellevue Hospital quickly realized that wounded and injured soldiers would need medical care near the battlefield. The hospital organized a mobile hospital that could be sent abroad. The Board of Managers of the Bellevue School of Nursing and the Board of Directors of the Auxiliary to Bellevue Hospital raised the necessary funds to equip and staff this hospital. Hospitals throughout the city and the United States did the same, but Bellevue was the first to be organized. Although it was not the first to be deployed, the government—in a sign of respect and recognition—designated the Bellevue contingent “United States Base Hospital #1.” The Bellevue doctors, nurses, and orderlies were sent to Vichy on the S.S. Olympic, the sister ship to the Titanic. They set up the hospital in the spa town at the Hôtel Astor and Hôtel Carlton, and remained there until the end of the war. (During World War II, the unit reorganized and, in homage to its earlier service, was designated “US General Hospital 1.”)

Anna Tjomsland, MD, a Bellevue physician, had volunteered to go to France during World War I, but the U.S. Army refused to allow a female physician (although female nurses were permitted). Undeterred, Tjomsland signed on as a contract surgeon with the Red Cross and later wrote of her war experiences in the book, “Bellevue in France.”   

Jane Delano, the Director of Nursing at Bellevue, became Superintendent of the United States Army Nurse Corps in 1909. She created American Red Cross Nursing, mobilizing more than 8,000 nurses trained in disaster relief by the time the US entered the war. Delano died in France during a post-armistice Red Cross mission in 1919 and was buried in the Loire Valley. She was later re-interred in Arlington National Cemetery. She was one of 296 nurses who lost their lives in relation to World War I.

---

From its founding in 1736, Bellevue utilized recruits from its penitentiary to do the jobs of nurses, housekeepers, and attendants. Unsurprisingly, the quality of nursing care and cleanliness was abysmal. When Louisa Lee Schuyler led an inspection for the State Board of Charities in 1872, her committee was horrified by the conditions. The Training School for Nurses at Bellevue Hospital opened in 1873, the first school in the United States to be run according to Florence Nightingale’s nursing principles. Patient care rapidly improved, and Bellevue’s nursing school became a model for nursing training. The iconic nursing uniform shown on the cover was designed by Euphemia Van Rensselaer and adopted in 1878. This photo was taken in the surgical operating theater. Nurses were not initially allowed in the theater, but fought (successfully) to assist in surgery. The white caps were designed with hygiene in mind, to keep stray hairs away from the nurses’ work. The Bellevue nursing pin of a crane (symbolizing vigilance) surrounded by poppies (symbolizing relief from suffering) was designed by Tiffany & Co.

The last nurse to wear the traditional white uniform, white shoes, cap, and pin was Rita LaCouture, who worked in Bellevue until her death in 1995. Those of us who were privileged to work with her remember her as a dynamo, and a special link to nursing history. (And she didn’t mind when we affectionately referred to the coffee filter on her head…)