Reliving the gory days
After a century of care, the last nursing graduates of Women’s College Hospital are preparing for a final sendoff by sharing their best stories: ‘I ran into the hall screaming, she’s not dead!’
When planning a dinner for 320 nurses, it is nice to have the appropriate snacks. Wafer-cookie tongue depressors, red licorice clogged arteries, kidney-stone jelly beans, marshmallow cotton balls, triscuit-cracker gauze, and IV bags with liquor labels.
Sherrill Colling, class of 1966, dreamed up the “treatment centre” for the final Women’s College Hospital School of Nursing alumnae dinner this May. It’s a cheekier, tastier version of the treatment centre where they prepared supplies for patient care when they were student nurses. Colling, on the decorating committee for the bash, has also created a life-size nurse out of pantyhose, with a hand-stitched face, wig, and a nursing cap for the festivities. “She looks pretty darn cute,” she says.
The first nurse graduated from the program in 1917, and the last class affiliated with the hospital graduated in 1975. Until the 1970s, most nurses in Canada earned their professional qualifications through hospital-based apprenticeship programs. At Women’s College there was no tuition, and room and board were provided by the hospital. In exchange, you worked — a lot. Colling and her friends made that place run — counting the medications, bathing the patients, changing their sheets, giving them back rubs, sterilizing tools for surgery. You saw first screams, last breaths, and all the hurting and healing in between.
Back then, there were essentially three career choices for women: teacher, nurse or secretary.
“Really we didn’t aspire to be CEOs of major corporations or anything,” Colling says. “It wasn’t the way you looked at things.”
Says Joan Hill, class of 1956: “I knew I couldn’t stand being a
secretary. I tried typing and it gave me a headache.”
For most graduates, the independence and responsibility that came with life and death during their training bonded them for life. “My classmates were like sisters,” Hill says. Some stayed in nursing, others left to raise their families, but they could always connect through the alumnae group — with the big yearly dinner and charity work. This year the alumnae group, which started in 1919, celebrated its 100th birthday. Since 1917, around 1,500 nurses have graduated from the program.
With no new members since1975, membership has declined and the executive decided it was time to wind down. This year’s dinner will be the last, fabulous party. They’ve been planning it for two years.
They booked a large banquet hall at the Chelsea hotel for Monday, hoping for at least 250 people, and worrying they might fall short. By April, more than 300 RSVPs had arrived from across Ontario, the Yukon, the U.S. and England. “We’re shooting the budget like you wouldn’t believe,” says Hill, the group’s treasurer. “We want this to be spectacular,” Colling says. As the final dinner looms, they are excited and anxious, just like those first days taking patient temperatures on the ward. They want to get it just right.
In the 19th century, hospitals had a public relations problem. They were generally seen as grim places of last resort.
“If you were going to die you wanted to die at home with your family,” says Kathryn McPherson, a history professor at York University who wrote Bedside Matters: The Transformation of
Canadian Nursing 1900-1990. If you were sick and living in poverty, with no family to look after you, you went to the hospital. Most were run as charities by religious institutions.
As germ theory became entrenched in the late 19th century, new antiseptic techniques required space and institutional support, McPherson says. Hospitals became the home of surgical innovation, but many were still skeptical. Administrators realized if they wanted more paying middle-class customers, they needed skilled staff.
“You can’t just hire these old washer women who live in a room in the basement, and basically keep the fire stoked (and) stole people’s brandy,” McPherson says. A nurse, committed to a treatment regimen — and not just caretaking — was the answer.
There were religious orders who dedicated themselves to nursing and health care, but sanitary reformer Florence Nightingale thought a different kind of secular nursing was needed. In the middle of the19th century, Nightingale went to Crimea, where the British were entrenched in a war that was an “administrative disaster,” McPherson says. “There weren’t enough supplies.” Nightingale and her nurses became this “great story,” and the image of the selfless and respectable upper-middle-class woman taking care of soldiers was blasted around the world thanks to the telegraph.
The idea of women having intimate knowledge of male bodies was a tough one for Victorians, so respectability became crucial to nursing’s acceptance, McPherson says. Enthused readers began to send money to her foundation, and Nightingale was talked into giving it to a British hospital to start a training school.
The first nursing school in English Canada was opened at the General and Marine Hospital in St. Catharines in 1874, with two of Nightingale’s students as teachers. By then, McPherson says, there was a “global buzz about the possibility of this new kind of nurse.”
The apprenticeship model became pervasive in Canadian hospitals in the early 20th century. The Women’s College Hospital school of nursing was founded in an ad-hoc way. Sarah Jane Glenn was so appreciative of the care she received at the hospital that she asked to stay and become a nurse herself.
The hospital officials agreed, and for two years, Glenn hustled up and down the stairs of the home on Rusholme Rd. that housed the hospital then, making beds, delivering meals and comforting babies. The doctors and hospital staff happily gathered in the backyard in April 1917 to present her with flowers and a custom graduation pin. More graduates followed and in 1919, an alumnae association was created.
Glenn did not live long enough to attend any dinners. She died of tuberculosis in 1922 at a Muskoka sanitarium.
Every hospital had its own uniform, and at Women’s College, the nursing student dress was blue with white bibs and aprons. Most nursing students had the same first patient. Her name was Mrs. Chase, and she was a rubber woman stuffed with sawdust, a placid expression on her leather face.
She was manufactured by the M.J. Chase Co. of Pawtucket, R.I., to help students practise how to bathe a patient in bed without splashing water in her face, administer an enema, wrap a splint or pump a stomach.
“Everything that happened to me happened in twelves,” an American nurse wrote in a tongue-in-cheek autobiography of Mrs. Chase in 1939. The students also practised giving hypodermic needles to oranges.
“It was the same sort of consistency I guess as a tight buttocks,” says Sherrill Colling, laughing.
Probationer nurses — “probies” as they were called — spent their first months in class before they were phased into life on the wards. If they made it through the first few months, they were given their nursing cap, a heavily starched piece of fabric that folded into a dainty hat, in a small ceremony.
Those first forays into the hospital ward were filled with nerve-wracking moments. “I didn’t know about the last breath,” says Hill, remembering that shift when she was helping “prepare the body” of a patient who had died. When she moved the woman, the last bit of oxygen escaped her lungs. It sounded like a moan.
“I ran into the hall screaming, she’s not dead!” (She was dead.) They had stints at other hospitals to learn psychiatric, pediatric and isolation care. The doctors and supervising nurses called the shots, and the students changed dressings, monitored vital signs, temperature, made poultices, and gave injections during their eight-hour shifts. By second year, they were assisting in surgery, and third year, they were essentially working on the ward. In her book, McPherson writes that Canadian hospitals relied heavily on student nurses who provided “substantial portions of patient-care labour.”
“Everybody got their bed changed,” says Donna Bryce, Class of 1966. “Everybody got a bath, everybody got a back rub at night.”
It was mostly female doctors and patients at Women’s College, but there were sometimes male patients, even if lessons on their anatomy proved fleeting, Debby Kaplan recalls.
“Our instructor stood there and said, ‘This is the penis, this is the scrotum.’ She was so mortified by the fact she had to do it.”
Before a residence was built, Women’s College students lived in a series of rented houses near the hospital. Joan Hill lived on the third floor of one house in the 1950s, along with 12 other women, and one bathroom. At the time, there were a few “red light” houses near the hospital, and nursing students were advised against looking in the windows. (One student in the late 1940s remembered seeing soldiers visiting those houses regularly, and her first instinct was that the homeowners were particularly patriotic.)
Student nurses were expected to follow the rules. There was a nightly curfew and the women were cautioned about wearing too much makeup. “Highly coloured” nail polish, perfume and jewelry were not in good taste, according to one nursing handbook. Your hair shouldn’t touch your collar. “I don’t even remember anyone with long hair,” Sherrill Colling says. When the Burton Hall residence opened in 1955 (on Florence Nightingale’s May 12 birthday), it was guarded by a few kindly “house mothers.” There were no shorts or slacks allowed in the main lounge. No snacks in the “conversation rooms.” McPherson says residences were typically “a little bit cloistered” to maintain the profession’s respectability and convince parents their daughters would be safe at school.
Male guests were not allowed above the first floor. Although it was against the rules, there was at least one case of beer, and maybe the odd boyfriend, spirited in. There were pay phones on each floor, and they would ring with invitations to parties.
“It was like a grocery list: we need six girls, a couple tall, a couple short, a couple blond … ” Debby Kaplan says. “We had one instructor who told us if you’re going to go to those fraternity parties, you never go below or above the first floor, or you’ll be knitting booties.”
When they had time off, they played cards, tried to see how many people they could fit on one bed, and explored Toronto. There was a yearly fashion show. Every day, they shared their experiences on the ward, like the time one of them accidentally knocked a sink off the wall with a bed, or their adventures in plastic surgery, assisting with nose jobs and hair plugs that didn’t always stick where they were supposed to.
On graduation day, they wore white dresses and proudly pinned their black bands on their starched caps to signify they were now registered nurses. They walked two by two to the University of Toronto’s Convocation Hall, carrying bouquets of red roses.
As the Women’s College experience came to an end Joan Hill says she and her friends wanted to see the world.
“A few of us wanted to go to California to start, and some did. I didn’t have enough money to get there — I got as far as London, Ontario, with another gal and then I worked in the operating room there.”
Hill worked in neurosurgery, others specialized in ophthalmology, pediatrics, surgery, emergency room work. In the postwar economy, where many women were fighting for a place in the workforce, nurses were “legitimated by the unique occupational service ethos and by the long tradition of female caring that the vocation represented,” McPherson writes.
When Hill left nursing to raise her family, she stayed connected through the alumnae group. There was a home and hospital committee, where younger nurses checked in on older members. Some of the early graduates were missionaries without pensions, and the alumnae would raise money to help them buy glasses, girdles and other medical supplies, Hill says. There were scholarships, a student loan fund, and a retired nurses fund — and dreams of running their own nursing home for their members. (That plan didn’t materialize.)
The hospital’s first archivist, Margaret Robins, was a nursing graduate who attended everyone’s funeral and held a small memorial service at the hospital for graduates who didn’t have family. “We looked out for each other when we knew there was a problem,” Hill says.
As the Canadian health care system modernized, nursing changed, requiring more technical knowledge, McPherson writes. University and college programs began to dominate. Ontario ended the hospital apprenticeship model in 1973. The nursing dress and starched cap eventually gave way to scrubs. Hospitals changed, and so did the type of care, many of the alumnae say.
“We look at the system today and are so distraught by it,” Donna Bryce says. “That’s probably why we’ll end up taking care of each other.”
The Burton Hall residence was demolished in 2012. The graduates grew older, and membership was declining. After a century, 2019 seemed like the right time for the alumnae group to disband.
Joan Hill knows it makes sense, but there is a melancholy feeling she can’t shake. She worries she’ll never see these people again. How do you say goodbye to a world you’ve known for 66 years?
For two years, the committee planning the party has met at Debby Kaplan’s North York condo, plotting the details of the final soiree.
“Anita, I really like your glasses,” Kaplan says with a mischievous grin as she puts on an identical pair of cherry-red cheaters with checkerboard arms. On this April day, the closeto-sold-out guest list is top of the agenda. Every year, the alumnae provide a free dinner to members celebrating their 50th anniversary — it’s a tradition.
This year it’s the class of 1969’s turn, but since they will miss the classes of 1970 through 1975, they agreed to extend the perk, which is no small cost with the turnout. The women look at maps of the ballroom, and plot logistics, and the surprises they have planned. The balloon wall onstage will cost $1,000. The balloon wall is out. How will the centrepieces be distributed at the end of the night? The group decides on the natural solution: whoever has the birthday closest to Florence Nightingale.
“Are people getting dressed up?” Anita asks. The consensus is flowy pants, sparkly shirts. Gwen Doust looks at her phone. Three more people have registered since the meeting began. “We’re up to 314.” The next day they will hit the room’s maximum capacity of 320. There is one person attending from the class of 1947.
For two hours Kaplan — head of the committee — keeps the conversation on track as they strategize the best way to handle the commemorative photos, what flowers need to be ordered, and how best to accommodate the crowd. Item 13 on the agenda is Other Business. “We need to celebrate the celebration with a celebration,” Kaplan says, echoing an earlier suggestion. The members of the planning committee look at their calendars — a mix of cellphones and one horse-themed agenda — and settle on a tentative date in June. The usual pot luck is quickly scuttled in favour of a restaurant.
The dinner on Monday will be the official goodbye — but it’s never really over. “People are already planning their next five-year reunion,” Kaplan later says. The sisterhood lives on.