» Nursing museum:
UWM facility will double its exhibit space
The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Center for Nursing History is doubling its exhibit space, with plans to turn adjacent offices into another room that will be used to expand displays on Florence Nightingale, World War II nurses, local nursing schools that have closed and public health nurses.
As soon as Patricia Sullivan graduated from the St. Mary’s Hospital nursing school in Milwaukee, she volunteered for the U.S. Army Nurse Corps, serving on a hospital ship that traveled across the Atlantic to pick up GIs wounded in Europe during World War II.
Through the following decades, she kept her nursing diploma, Army papers, war-time photos and St. Mary’s cape with monogram on the collar. When she died at the age of 87 in 2010 in Mobile, Ala., her memorabilia could have been tossed or ended up at a rummage sale. But mindful of their mother’s proud World War II service, her daughters donated the mementos to a museum at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee School of Nursing.
“I hated for it to get lost and nobody wanted it,” said Patty Parris, Patricia Sullivan Conditt’s daughter. “I thought (UWM’s nursing museum) would be a wonderful place for others to see it. And my family can go there and see it.”
Quite a few World War II veterans — or more often, their families — are donating uniforms, scrapbooks, photos, pins, hats and other items that illustrate the evolution of nursing. The UWM Center for Nursing History is one of only a handful of nursing museums in America and has been on campus since 1973.
So much has been donated recently, including all of the memorabilia from UW-Madison’s School of Nursing, that the museum is doubling its exhibit space this year. Architects are working on plans to turn adjacent offices into another room of the museum, which will be used to expand displays on Florence Nightingale, World War II nurses, local
nursing schools that have closed and public health nurses.
“We’re preserving the legacy,” said museum director Laurie Glass. “It’s important nurses and nursing students know where they come from and the important things nurses did.”
Display cases show small containers of syringes nurses carried on their belts, nursing school pins, public heath department police badges and white nurses’ hats unique to each school.
One display case is dedicated to Nightingale with a first edition of her “Notes on Nursing,” photos, a candle holder and a silver belt worn by a nurse who worked with the founder of modern nursing in the barracks hospital in Scutari, Turkey, during the Crimean War.
Another case holds the mementos of World War I nurse Ada Garvey, including her mess kit, white nurse’s hat with red cross emblem, dog tags, scrapbook and a French phrasebook, which came in handy while she was stationed in France.
On the walls are original posters recruiting nurses to serve in World War I and II.
“Every war has had a major recruitment effort for nurses,” said Glass, who answered one of those recruiting calls, joining the Navy during the Vietnam War.
On mannequins are World War I and World War II nursing uniforms, capes and nursing school uniforms and a Boeing Airlines stewardess sky blue outfit and cap from the 1930s, dating from a time when the first flight attendants were nurses hired to help passengers cope with air sickness.
Glass, a nursing professor at UWM for three decades, has been in charge of the museum since 1980. She served at the Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Md., helping combat veterans from Vietnam with limb injuries, and also served in the Navy Reserves until 1990.
Sullivan was assigned to the Army hospital ship Wisteria, making four round trips from New York to Europe to take wounded troops back to America. She visited Paris at the end of the war. The photos donated by her daughters show her “on this hospital ship with a gazillion men, a cute 22year-old having the time of her life,” said Parris, whose parents met when her father, a doctor, served on the ship.
The Ironwood, Mich., native quit nursing to raise four children and returned to her career when they were grown, working with heart patients in an intensive care unit.
Parris doesn’t know why her mother chose nursing for a career, but she does know why she joined the Army during World War II.
“Her boyfriend at that time had decided to join the Army and she thought it would be a great idea. She got in and he did not — they found out he had tuberculosis,” Parris said.
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reporter Meg Jones can be reached at meg.jones@jrn.com