   
Drawings from Lakeside nurse, Elizabeth Folkemer,
during World War I. |
Allison, the school's superintendent, to take charge of the unit's elite
corps of 64 nurses, 43 of whom were graduates of the Lakeside Training School. Some of the
nurse members of the Lakeside Unit became the nucleus of nurses for the Cleveland Clinic,
set up shortly after their return from Rouen, France.6 The war also prompted new thinking about the difference between training nurses and educating them. In October 1918, 437 college graduates were recruited for the Vassar Training Camp where they were given intensive training in nursing. Intended to help meet the nursing needs of the nation in time of war, the camp attracted mature, intelligent women who made excellent nurses. Twenty-nine of these college-educated recruits finished their training in the Lakeside class of 1920. Immediately following the war, two important nursing studies provided the impetus for the ultimate formation of the Western Reserve School of Nursing. The Cleveland Hospital and Health Survey, published in 1920, provided key evidence that hospital training schools required reorganization and improvement. While this report praised these schools for exhibiting a "spirit of devotion and service", it severely criticized them for the "inadequacy of teaching and equipment, and the exploitation of students, which has too often been accepted in lieu of education."7 During the same period, the Rockefeller Foundation funded a study of the relationship between nursing service and education. Begun in 1919, and published in 1923 under the title Nursing and Nursing Education in the United States, it was called in its time "the most notable and valuable contribution ever made to nursing education and nursing history."8 This study found that the underlying problem in the education of nurses was the dual character and conflicting goals of training schools. These schools had the responsibility of both educating nurses and staffing hospitals. Frequently, these goals were in conflict and represented to nurses "the crux of our problem, the heart of our difficulty."9 The Rockefeller study concluded that the most appropriate way to shield students from exploitation by hospitals was through a university school of nursing. As a result of these studies, Samuel Mather, the President of Lakeside Hospital Board of Trustees, took the initiative to develop a university-based nursing program. In 1918 he asked Mary Dunning Thwing, the wife of the president of the Western Reserve University, to form a committee. He charged the committee to come up with a plan for consolidating all the various nurses' training schools in Cleveland into a single university school affiliated with the College for Women of Western Reserve University. In hopes of securing an endowment, the committee asked several prominent Clevelanders to join the planning committee, among them Frances Payne Bolton. The choice of Bolton was as inevitable as it was natural. Well known in nursing circles, she had served on the Board of the Visiting Nurse Association since 1905, and after 1910 on the Board of Lady Managers of Lakeside Hospital. In 1918, Bolton had used her personal friendship with Secretary of War, Newton D. Baker, to arrange an urgent wartime interview. Bolton (along with Annie Goodrich, chief inspecting nurse of the U.S. Amy Hospitals, and Florence Brewster of Cleveland) convinced Baker that wounded soldiers deserved to be cared for by trained nurses, not volunteers. 6
On the history of Cleveland Clinic nursing, see Diane Ewart Grabowski, Without Page 3 |
