Columbia Nursing: A Brief History

On December 6, Stephen Novak, Head of Archives & Special Collections at Columbia’s Augustus C. Long Health Sciences Library, and Suzanne Law Hawes, BS '59 gave a virtual presentation on the history of the School of Nursing. Using archival documents and images, the talk focused on three transformative periods of the School’s history: the “heroic” age of its founding under the leadership of Maxwell as the Presbyterian Hospital Training School; its lengthy and torturous road to a university affiliation in the 1920s and ‘30s; and its trials, tribulations, and finally rebirth in the 1980s and ‘90s.