Isabel Adams Hampton Robb

July 19, 2002

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.