Milestones

We at Penn Nursing are proud to share our 125th anniversary with another landmark nursing institution, the Visiting Nurse Association of Greater Philadelphia. Until its inception on March 2, 1886, “no one had ever heard of such a thing as nursing the sick poor [sic] except in hospitals,” recalled founder Mrs. William Furness Jenks. The work of visiting nurses was hard, often taking them to “run-down areas which housed the city’s workers” and where such contagions as typhoid, diphtheria, and tuberculosis were rampant.

The efforts of these pioneering women – indeed, all were women – and their visiting nurse counterparts around the country formed the foundation of home nursing and community nursing as we know them today.

The history of the VNA of Greater Philadelphia has its home here at Penn Nursing, in the premier center for nursing history in the world, the Barbara Bates Center for the Study of the History of Nursing. The Bates Center -- notably celebrating its 25th anniversary this year -- houses the records of the Visiting Nurse Society, and a vast collection of materials from nursing history.

The entire Bates collection – a rich array of written materials, artifacts, and photographs from nursing history -- encompasses nursing education and healthcare institutions, non-profits, and nursing luminaries. The Bates Center is open to scholars across all fields and non-academic researchers interested in nursing. It brings nursing history to life, and is a jewel of our School and our discipline. Happy anniversary to us all!

Nursing Through Time

I am delighted to announce the launch of an exciting new website developed at Penn Nursing: Nursing, History and Healthcare at www.nursing.upenn.edu/nhhc. The site provides a lens through which scholars, students, clinicians, journalists, policymakers, and consumers can understand the historical roots of many issues and challenges faced by the nursing profession.  It is that profession that has devised ways and means of delivering health care services to the American public throughout the years. The website also addresses a wide range of current topics vital to comprehending and broadening our understanding of healthcare and nursing concerns, including the role of professional nurses, nurse shortages, workplace problems, and public health issues.

This website received significant funding from the National Institutes of Health, the National Library of Medicine, a Scholarly Works in Biomedicine and Health grant, and the University of Pennsylvania Research Foundation, as well as support from the American Academy of Nursing’s expert panel on nursing and history and our School’s Barbara Bates Center for the Study of the History of Nursing.  The site was created by our nurse historian Jean C. Whelan, PhD, RN, under the initial direction of our late Professor Karen Buhler-Wilkerson, PhD, RN, FAAN.