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From the start of the
Lakeside Hospital Training School in 1898, the School was endowed with exceptional
leadership. Isabel Hampton Robb, a national leader in the field of nursing, took an active
role in the development of the curriculum for the new hospital. Robb's background included
authorship of one of the classic to Cleveland texts in nursing education and broad
experience in implementing reforms that embodied the ideals of Florence Nightingale. Robb
insisted that good nursing required intelligence. Ideally, training should not only
prepare women to give compassionate care to the sick, but also to take an active role in
reforming the conditions that produce illness. Robb thought that a training school should
be a place where "properly selected women are given such moral and educational
advantages that they may go forth equipped to aid in the practical solution of some of the
various social problems, which can only be solved by the help of intelligent womanly
work."4 Despite the aspirations of early nurse reformers like Robb, instruction at training schools often fell short of the ideal. Because hospital training schools lacked autonomy, they functioned more as sources of inexpensive labor for hospitals than as educational institutions. Classroom time was limited, and often students were too exhausted to study after long, grueling hours on the wards. Helena McMillan, Lakeside Training School's first principal, saw no immediate solution to this problem. She wrote: "I am firmly convinced that our only educational salvation is to get the pupil nurse entirely under control of the nurse educator, which means getting her away from the hospital."5 Nevertheless, in the years prior to World War I, the Lakeside Training School achieved a reputation for producing excellent graduate nurses. Part of its success as a training institution can be attributed to the quality of the supervisory staff of Lakeside Hospital, many of whom were graduates of the school. Most graduates, however, expected to minister to the sick as "private duty nurses" in their patients' own homes. A few, catching the reform spirit of the Progressive Era, also found opportunities for service in some of Cleveland's poorest neighborhoods. The Visiting Nurse Association had strong ties to the Lakeside Training School through Kate Hanna Harvey and Isabel Wetmore Lowman, two prominent social activists who served on the boards of both institutions. World War I opened up a vast field of opportunity for nurses that tapped deep wellsprings of patriotism and service. The Lakeside Unit, headed by the hospital's chief of surgery, George W Crile, was the first American unit to serve in France. Crile enlisted Grace E. 4 Address of Mrs. Hunter Robb
at Dedicatory Exercises," Annual Report, Lakeside Hospital, Page 2
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