The heritage of the College of Nursing dates back to 1885, when the college’s first antecedent, the St. Luke’s Hospital Training School of Nursing, opened to offer diploma education to nurses. In 1903, the Presbyterian Hospital School of Nursing accepted its first students. From 1956 to 1968, nurses were taught at the merged Presbyterian-St. Luke’s School of Nursing. Before the establishment of the Rush University College of Nursing in 1972, more than 7,000 nurses had graduated from these schools. Today, more than 5,500 baccalaureate, master’s and doctoral students have graduated from Rush College of Nursing.
History of St. Luke's Hospital Training School of Nursing
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On Jan. 29, 1885, St. Luke’s Free Hospital established its first nursing department when it moved into a new building erected on its old site on Indiana Avenue near 14th Street. Four nurses — two women and two men — had handled all nursing care in the old building. But the new, larger hospital was organized by wards, which meant more complicated work for nurses to do. The solution was to form a nurse-training program organized on the Florence Nightingale model, run by nurses, not doctors. |
St. Luke’s then became the 35th nursing school in the United States. One of its first superintendents was Catherine L. Lett, who led the students in their educational and spiritual pursuits.
Early candidates for the new Episcopal school had to be high school graduates between 21 and 31 years old who came from a “good family background.” The uniform for street wear, which students wore until 1912, included a long gray cloak, a gray stringless bonnet edged with black velvet and a veil. The working uniform included an apron and an organdy hat. In 1939, St. Luke’s nurses also required white shoes and stockings for their uniform. Students wore a pin engraved with a blue cross and “St. Luke, Chapter X, Verse 9,” which refers to the Biblical verse: “Heal the sick that are therein, and say, the Kingdom of God has come nigh unto you.”
History of Presbyterian Hospital School of Nursing
| Presbyterian Hospital established its School of Nursing in 1903 under the guidance of M. Helena McMillan. The Presbyterian school was one of the first to put its students on an eight-hour day and one of the first to charge tuition. Its three-and-a-half-year program was longer than that of most schools, and its affiliation with Rush Medical College provided excellent learning experiences. |  |
The first nurses’ residence was a former girls’ club at 277 South Ashland Avenue. After 1912, nurses lived at the Sprague Home at 1750 West Congress Street, across from the hospital. Incoming Presbyterian students were told to bring four gingham or calico dresses and “noiseless shoes.” Presbyterian graduates wore a pin with “PHSN” engraved on it, not a cross as most nurses wore.
In World War II, many Presbyterian nursing students joined the U.S. Cadet Nurse Corps from 1943 to 1948. The cadet program marked the first time the federal government underwrote nursing education.
History of Presbyterian-St. Luke's Hospital School of Nursing
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In the postwar era, both St. Luke’s and Presbyterian Hospitals were looking to reserve their patient base and expand their healthcare services. Both distinguished teaching hospitals, they were competing for many of the same patients and donors. The trustees at both hospitals voted to merge operations in 1956, which led to the creation of the Presbyterian-St. Luke’s Hospital and the combined School of Nursing. |
The two nursing schools were worthy of each other. In the late 1940s, Presbyterian had multiplied its college and university affiliation and added psychiatry and tuberculosis work to its clinical rotations. In 1952, the Presbyterian school replaced its old Sprague home on Congress Parkway with a new 300-room, 14-story building. Eight years later, administrators renamed the building Schweppe-Sprague to reflect both Presbyterian and St. Luke’s origins. The Schweppe School of Nurses was part of the St. Luke’s complex built in the 1940s.
Edith D. Payne, director of nursing education at St. Luke’s, also administered the nursing service of the merged hospitals. Payne, the first St. Luke’s nurse with a master’s degree, valued nursing research and overhauled the school’s training program.
Over the next decades, the hospital sought to enhance its competitiveness and the resources it could offer to patients. In 1969, the hospital, along with its nursing school, merged with Rush Medical College, which had revived its charter after being inactive for several decades. The result was Rush-Presbyterian-St. Luke's Medical Center. In 1972, the Board of Trustees established Rush University, of which the College of Nursing is now part.
History of Rush University College of Nursing
| Formally established in 1973, the Rush University degree nursing program combined education and practice, as the Presbyterian-St. Luke's diploma nursing school had done. Following the practitioner-teacher model, the faculty practiced, as well as taught, nursing. Faculty members were expected to be researchers as well as consultants who shared their clinical expertise both inside and outside the College and Medical Center. |  |
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Luther Christman, PhD, (pictured left) a nationally known nurse educator from Vanderbilt University and the first male dean of nursing in the United States, introduced the Rush Model for Nursing, which stressed a faculty comprised of expert clinical nurses, use of a physician-nurse team, quality assurance, and research. |
He also designed a curriculum with a strong base in science and theory, in the belief that understanding principles of physical and behavioral science would help students develop into competent practitioners in any field of clinical practice.
| Today, the College of Nursing is setting new standards for excellence in nursing education and patient care through its nationally recognized education and research programs. Under the guidance of Kathleen Gainor Andreoli, DSN, FAAN, dean from 1987 to 2006, and the college's current dean, Melanie C. Dreher, PhD, RN, FAAN, (pictured right) the college has been focused on re-engineering, reorganizing, and relocating. |  |
Rush University College of Nursing is ranked in the top tier of the nation's nursing schools. In keeping with it's focus on modernization, the college of Nursing closed the doors on its former home in Schweppe-Sprague Hall in the summer of 1997 and opened its new facility in the Armour Academic Center of Rush University.
Rush University Medical Center Archives contains an extensive collection of uniforms, documents and various artifacts from all four schools of nursing. For more information about visiting Rush's archives or submitting an artifact for the archives' collection, visit the Rush University Medical Center Archives Web site.
