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Mary D. White (ND-ND) http://tinyurl.com/MDWhite

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The Training School for Nurses in San Francisco

From Overland Monthly, 1887. Read Online

Reader: Jessica Teeter

In 1882, the West's first nursing school opened in San Francisco, but while the school was ready for students, many students were not ready for the school.

In the nineteenth century, many Californians didn't understand the intense requirements of nursing, believing the profession to be a romantic one and imagining themselves as new Florence Nightingales. At least, that's how writer Mary D. White described this model of a misguided student.

First graduating class, University of California San Francisco School of Nursing, photographer unknown, 1921.

Her head is full of visions of herself as "an angel of mercy, flitting hither and thither, laving the brows of the dying heroes," for which most enviable service she is to be rewarded by undying fame. A month or less of realism in the small overcrowded hospital, among suffering women and petulant little children, is generally quite sufficient to dispel her dreams She finds the nurse's work vastly more than fanning or bathing the feverish brows of grateful patients, or carrying them dainty food prepared by other hands. Her work carries her among duties which nothing but an abiding nobleness of heart, a constant living in the true ideal of her profession, can render other than trivial or repulsive.

Mary D. White's "The Training School for Nurses in San Francisco" was published in the Overland Monthly in 1887, five years after the nursing school's opening.

–Contributed by Jessica Barganski.