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For much of nursing history, most full-time nurses were
either unmarried or widowed. Most married nurses, if
they worked, did so as occasional private duty nurses,
which often required them to stay and live with their
patient. Those few who worked in hospitals (most were
students) usually were required to live in nursing homes.
Many of those who had been nurses and left remained
active in nursing organizations.
This was the case with Isabel Adams Hampton Robb (1860-1910),
who served as president of both the American Society
of Superintendents of Training Schools for Nurses, which
eventually became the National League for Nursing, and
the Nurses Associated Alumnae of the United States and
Canada, which became the American Nurses Association.
After Robb graduated from Bellevue Hospital Training
School in 1883, she and some of her classmates moved
to Rome to serve as nurses at St. Paul's House, a small
hospital established to serve English and American travelers.
Upon her return to the United States, she was appointed
superintendent of nurses at the Illinois Training School
for Nurses at Cook County Hospital in Chicago.
While there, she made some important changes in the
way nursing was taught. She abolished the practice of
having student nurses do private duty nursing, broadened
the curriculum and established affiliations with other
hospitals. Most important, she established the first
grading policy in a nursing school.
In 1889, she moved to become head of a newly established
nursing school at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore.
In addition to administering and teaching, she also
wrote a classic text, Nursing: Its Principles and Practice,
originally published in 1894.
She resigned from her position at Johns Hopkins Hospital
in 1894 to marry Hunter Robb, a physician, and they
moved to Cleveland, where she became a professor of
gynecology at Case Western Reserve University.
She continued to be a source of new ideas for nursing;
under her direction, a course in hospital economics
was established at Teachers College, Columbia University,
which became the base for the department of nursing
education. She also was a member of the founding committee
for the American Journal of Nursing and one of the founders
of the International Council of Nurses.
Money received after her death helped establish the
Isabel Hampton Robb scholarship fund, which eventually
became the basis for the Nurses Educational Fund, a
private foundation that contributed scholarships to
nurses earning advanced degrees.
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