Public Health Nursing

The Elizabeth Marie Bear Collection consists of materials assembled by Bear throughout her career.  Particular strengths here include correspondence with social anthropologist Esther Lucile Brown in addition to a taped interview with Brown, the subject of Bear's doctoral dissertation.  Also present are letters and other items of her colleague and fellow nurse Martha Beth Hicks.  Materials from two organizations – the Frontier Nursing Service and the Penn Center of St. Helena Island, South Carolina, a historic African-American cultural and educational institution – are represented.  These primarily include photographs and artifacts.

The Caroline Benoist Collection comprises Mississippi Public Health nursing reports, printed lectures given at Mississippi State Nursing Association meetings, printed material containing both prenatal and post-partum maternity instructions, nurse training manuals and nursing procedure handouts, professional correspondence, health statistics, and newspapers clippings from that time period. The collection includes detailed information about nursing care of maternity patients and treatments of such diseases as tuberculosis, polio, syphilis, and diphtheria.

Please see also our web exhibit featuring the Benoist Collection:
http://cnhi-benoist.nursing.virginia.edu/

The Rita K. Chow Papers document the career, personal, and professional interests of Rita Kathleen Chow (b. 1926), Ed.D., R.N., A.H.N.-C.(P.), F.A.A.N. The scope of the holdings ranges from Chow's educational and early-professional accomplishments, through her formal career with the United States Public Health Service, to her continued educational and leadership activities in retirement.

This collection consists of personal papers, images, and ephemera related to Thelma Shobe Cook’s school experiences and public health nursing career. The majority of the collection consists of the correspondence, documents and publications surrounding the establishment of the Thelma Shobe Cook Endowed Chair in Ethical Spiritual Dimensions of Nursing Practice at the University of California, San Francisco School of Nursing.

The entirety of the Doris F. Glick Collection comprises materials relating to the three Charlottesville, Va., area Primary Care Nursing Clinics established by Dr. Glick in the 1990s. Glick sited the clinics at the Westhaven Public Housing Complex and at the Crescent Halls Housing Facility for the aged and for persons with disabilities -- both in Charlottesville, Virginia -- and at a "Health Cottage" facility associated with the Greene County, Virginia, public schools.

The Nancy Milio Collection contains manuscript and published materials principally related to the organization and operation of the Mom and Tots Neighborhood Center, which Milio established in southeast Detroit, Michigan in 1966.

Most important are a series of nine "field notebooks," or diaries kept by professor Milio between 1965 and 1968. These notebooks comprise a near daily record of Milio's activities, meetings, interactions, conversations, assessments, and impressions of the various individuals and conditions she encountered as a public health nurse and community organizer in the Kercheval and McClellan district of Detroit, a low-income, African American neighborhood.

Of particular significance are the insights Milio gained regarding race relations and identity formation, and the critical importance of collaborative strategies to the successful organization of a truly neighborhood-based women's health service and day care facility.

Please also see our web exhibit featuring the Milio Collection.

The Osgood Collection is composed primarily of government publications containing data from numerous nursing surveys from the 1960s through the 1990s. These studies focus primarily on nursing education and manpower, and legal issues related to the health professions.

The majority of the Lois Miller Pilch Collection contains materials written and assembled by Pilch during her long career with the Washington, D.C. Department of Public Health, from 1948 to 1981. Subject areas concern public services for adolescent health and for children with mental and physical disabilities. Global-level program descriptions and reviews complement documentation generated by daily operations. Of particular interest here are case reports describing individuals and family circumstances; use of these items is restricted to IRB-certified researchers.

This small collection contains materials from Aline Jeannette (Vier) Shrum's early professional career as a nurse, 1946-1958. Ms. Shrum worked principally at sites overseas from her native London: South Africa and Brazil. Official documents and correspondence record her trajectory and assignments, including immunization and health certification records, tax documents from the authorities in South Africa, and rules for nurses (promulgated by the General Nursing Council for England and Wales in 1924 and 1931). A number of publications from Guy's Hospital, London, give history, news, and medical information for the hospital's nurse graduates. Of particular interest is a photograph album showing African patients at Grey's Hospital, Pietermaritzburg, in the province of Natal, South Africa. The Shrum Collection also includes four metal boxes outfitted for travel; three of these contain medical supplies and equipment, not yet inventoried.

The Smith Papers offer a glimpse into the life of an Army nurse through keepsakes and photograph albums, and highlight as well Smith's later career in public health nursing. Included are Army publications and pamphlets relative to World War One, and a rare complete set of hospital magazines produced for the patients and staff of the Camp Grant Base Hospital, Illinois, in 1919. Among other items Smith saved is a spectacular collection of panoramic photographs, with views of Fort Sheridan, Illinois; the 1921 Army School of Nursing graduation ceremony in a forest at the Presidio, San Francisco, California; and of the nearby facilities at Letterman General Hospital.

The Camilla Louise Wills Collection documents Wills' experiences as a Red Cross nurse serving overseas during World War I and her subsequent career in public health and health education in the southwestern United States. The bulk of the collection concerns Wills' experiences in the nineteens-teens and twenties, particularly during the World War One years.

This collection of research materials derives from two grant-funded clinical trials directed by Professor Bullock of the Sinclair School of Nursing at the University of Missouri, Columbia.  Professor Bullock and her colleagues crafted these projects as randomized, controlled trials of telephone and in-person visits, designed in the first case to aid smoking cessation among low-income pregnant women residing in the Ozarks region of Missouri. The supplementary research project queried the effectiveness of such methods of social support in reducing domestic violence in homes with young children in the same region.

Bullock and her colleagues published the results of their statistical data collection and analysis — one reprint for the smoking cessation study is included here — but the living conditions and life experiences of the women who participated in the trial offer many more opportunities for scholarly interrogation of the nature of poverty in early 21st-century rural America.  

This collection of research materials derives from two grant-funded clinical trials directed by Professor Bullock of the Sinclair School of Nursing at the University of Missouri, Columbia.  Professor Bullock and her colleagues crafted these projects as randomized, controlled trials of telephone and in-person visits, designed in the first case to aid smoking cessation among low-income pregnant women residing in the Ozarks region of Missouri. The supplementary research project queried the effectiveness of such methods of social support in reducing domestic violence in homes with young children in the same region.

Bullock and her colleagues published the results of their statistical data collection and analysis — one reprint for the smoking cessation study is included here — but the living conditions and life experiences of the women who participated in the trial offer many more opportunities for scholarly interrogation of the nature of poverty in early 21st-century rural America.