Isabel Hampton Robb, Nurse Reformer (1860-1910)

Isabel Hampton graduated in 1883 from the Bellevue Hospital Training School in New York City.  This school was among the first in the United States to be modeled on the reforms of Florence Nightingale.   Before the hospital training school, Nightingale wrote nurses "were generally those who were too old, too weak, too drunken, too dirty, too stolid, or too bad to do anything else" At John Hopkins Hospital where Isabel Hampton served as superintendent of nurses, she published Nursing:  Its Principles and Practice for Hospital and Private use (1894).  During those years she helped found the Nurses Associated Alumnae (later the American Nurses Association) and served as its first president.

Her marriage to Hunter Robb, a physician who took a post at Lakeside Hospital, brought Robb to Cleveland in 1894.   Isabel Robb exerted a profound influence on the creation and early years of Lakeside Training School.  Convinced that nursing the sick should go hand-in-hand with educating patients in how to preserve health, she also helped to found the Cleveland Visiting Nurse Association in 1901.  Robb's prominence as an advocate for nursing attracted a group of young socially prominent Cleveland woman who became volunteers for the Visiting Nurse Association, among them Kate Hanna Harvey, Florence Brewster, Isabel Wetmore Lowman, and Frances Payne Bolton.

While Robb raised her family in Cleveland she published two more books, Nursing Ethics (1900) and Educational Standards for Nurses (1907).  She also set up the first graduate program in nursing administration at Columbia Teachers College and helped to found the American Journal of Nursing.  Recalling her as one of the profession's pioneers, her successors, Adelaide Nutting and Lavinia Dock, wrote in History of Nursing   (1912):   "With great practical ability in details, Miss Hampton had a power of seeing the future which was like that of a sibyl.  She had visions of nursing growth, organization, and activites, which came first as hazy, indefinite pictures, gradually taking form until all was clear and vivid, filling her with joy and enthusiasm, eager interest, and untiring energy."

In 1920, Lakeside Training School's graduating class presented the School with $450 to serve as the nucleus of an endowment for a new school of nursing. One year later, Western Reserve University set up a Department of Nursing Education. When funding was not forthcoming from the Rockefeller Foundation, prospects for the new department seemed uncertain. However, Frances Bolton, at that time a member of Lakeside Hospital's Board of Trustees, was convinced that Cleveland needed university-based nursing education, and she had the financial resources to do something about it.

Robb at Johns Hopkins (prior to 1894). 
Alan Mason Chesney Medical Archives
of the Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions.

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