Welcome to this episode of Nursing EDge Unscripted Saga where we journey through the history of nursing education using stories that connect the past to the present and then our future as we reimagine our teaching and learning. November is the birth month of Mary Adelaide Nutting: educator, pioneer, and a force at the turn of the 19th century who changed the trajectory of nursing
as we know it today. As a dedicated member of the American Society of Superintendents of Training Schools for Nurses, known as the Society, the organization that would later become the National League for Nursing, she played an influential role in raising the quality of nursing education.
Her story is a story of courage persistence and tenacity at a time when nursing was viewed as a role women were born to and did not require formal education, at a time when the medical community objected to nursing's growing self-governance. Mary Adelaide Nutting was born in Quebec, Canada on November 1, 1858. As a child she developed a passion for music; an excellent student, she became a teacher instructing piano and music education in Ottawa.
Her interest in the arts permeated her life, but her admiration for Florence Nightingale and her work in the Crimea, coupled with the slow and painful death of her mother, led her to nursing at the age of 31. In 1889, she enrolled in the inaugural class at the Johns Hopkins Training School in Baltimore. At the end of the two-year program, Ms. Nutting was offered a position as head nurse. She was quickly promoted to superintendent of nurses and the principal of the training
school. She brought structure and rigor to the training program, creating positive and more formalized standards. She expanded the curriculum in the school of nursing from two to three years, added a pre-licensure training period, limited the number of hours nursing students could work, persuaded the school to offer scholarships to promising students, and restructured the curriculum to include field experiences outside of the hospital.
She also began a professional nursing library at Johns Hopkins, from which developed her seminal work, a four-volume "History of Nursing," co-authored with Lavinia Dock. Seeking to address challenges to the profession regionally and nationally, Ms. Nutting moved beyond the walls of Johns Hopkins to make significant contributions to the nursing profession. She was one of the founders of
the American Journal of Nursing in 1900. In 1903, she took on the role of the first president of the newly created State Association of Graduate Nurses in Maryland and collaborated with colleagues to draft the first nurse practice law in Maryland. In 1904, because of her sustained efforts to regulate the profession in Maryland, she was honored to become the first registered nurse in the state.
Ms Nutting's ultimate goal was to coalesce nurse training schools with university education. In 1903, as chair of the Society's Education Committee, she set a goal to find an educational institution where teachers of nursing could be prepared. To accomplish this innovation, she taught part-time at an experimental program in hospital economics at Teachers College, Columbia University
in New York City. From these two experiences with the Society and at Columbia, Ms. Nutting exerted a profound influence on nursing education. In 1910, Columbia created a professorship in nursing and made Ms. Nutting the Chair of the Department of Nursing and Health, making her the first woman in America to hold such a post. She revolutionized their program, creating a graduate program for advanced training in the
field of nursing. This was extraordinary, because at that time, women, and especially nurses, didn't go to college. In 1923 on the 30th anniversary of the Society, now the National League for Nursing Education or NLNE, Ms. Nutting spoke of this transformative time.
In 1917, the NLNE published a "Standard Curriculum for Schools of Nursing," written by the Committee on Education and chaired by Ms. Nutting, to serve as a guide for schools to establish acceptable training for the profession of nursing. Revised in 1927, this publication radicalized the education of students calling for a balance between theory or science with practice in an emerging yet embryonic nursing curricula.
Twenty years later, the NLNE published the final version of "A Curriculum Guide for Schools of Nursing," calling for objective measures to determine the achievement of educational outcomes. Mary Adelaide Nutting died in White Plains, New York in 1948 close to her 90th birthday. She led the nursing community for over 30 years and her influence on the field is still greatly felt today. In 1944, the National League for Nursing Education created the Mary Adelaide Nutting Medal in her
honor and awarded the first one to her. The award is given today by the NLN for outstanding teaching and leadership in nursing education. She is perhaps the most prominent figure in the development of the modern field of nursing. And so the saga continues, and may our saga continue as we bring to a close this episode of Nursing EDge Unscripted Saga. Thank you for joining us...