They care

Yale University Library

The photograph above shows the original faculty of the Yale School of Nursing. Standing (left to right): Helen Stelling, Margaret Carrington, Amelia Grant, Dorothy Tarbox, Bertha Harmer. Seated: Effie J. Taylor, Annie W. Goodrich, Mabel Fletcher. View full image

The Yale School of Nursing admitted its first students in February of 1924. Their classrooms and offices were located in a space on the top floor of 310 Cedar Street, near where the School of Medicine housed animals that were used for experimentation.

The modesty of the space did little to indicate the momentousness of the project. YSN was the country’s first autonomous nursing school,
established with its own dean, faculty, and budget. Until that point, nursing schools had been attached to, or contained within, other schools—of medicine, of liberal arts, and more. Until YSN arrived, nursing schools had always been subservient to some mission not of their design.
                                                          
Annie Warburton Goodrich, YSN’s founding dean and the first female dean at Yale University, made it clear: “We shall never render our full service to the community until our place is found also in the university.”

Over the past century—having found their place—YSN students, faculty, administrators, and alumni have been instrumental to the development and the definition of modern nursing. YSN has tied nursing to larger concerns of public health; it created and launched the country’s first graduate- level nurse practitioner program; it created hospice care in the US; it has developed international initiatives and strives to bring diversity into the world of patient care.

On the following pages are short profiles of ten YSN alums working in diverse areas of health care.