Open to researchers. Copyright status of most of the images is undetermined.
Photograph album, 1872-1942, documenting the School of Nursing, Presbyterian Hospital, and the Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center.
History and Biography
Presbyterian Hospital in the City of New York founded a Training School for Nurses in 1892. The name was changed to the Presbyterian Hospital School of Nursing circa 1904 and to the Columbia University-Presbyterian Hospital School of Nursing after a partial affiliation with the university in the late 1930s. Today it is a wholly university school known as the Columbia University School of Nursing.
The school was originally located at Presbyterian Hospital, then located between Park and Madison Avenues and East 70th and 71st Streets. In 1904 Florence Nightingale Hall, the School’s first separate building, opened across from the hospital on East 71st Street. In 1928 it was the first of the constituents to move to the new Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center campus in the Washington Heights neighborhood of Manhattan where it remains today.
Organization
The album has 67 leaves with approximately 100 photographs dating from 1872 to about 1942. Subjects documented include Presbyterian Hospital exteriors and interiors, both at the Park Ave. and the Columbia-Presbyterian sites; interiors of Florence Nightingale Hall; portraits of early graduates; classroom scenes from the 1890s and the 1940s; nursing at Sternberg General Hospital, Fort Thomas, Georgia, during the Spanish-American War; Innis Arden, a recreational facility for School of Nursing faculty and students located at Old Greenwich, CT (1920s); the Presbyterian Hospital blood bank (early 1940s); commencements from the 1930s; and Hill Top Camp, a residential summer camp located in Hawthorne, NY for undernourished children from Presbyterian’s Tuberculosis Clinic (1920s).
Though the earliest photograph dates from 1872, internal evidence suggests the album was assembled in the early 1940s. Almost all the images are paper prints which have either been pasted directly onto the page or secured by photo corners. Several photographs are missing and several more are loose. The latest dated images are from 1942. Not all images are identified.
Subject Headings and Related Records
Administrative Information
Transfer from the Columbia University School of Nursing, 2016 (acc. #2016.005).
Because of the fragility of many of the photographs, the album was disbound, the pages placed in individual folders, and then the folders rehoused in a flat box. Loose photographs were scanned by Archives & Special Collections in 2016 with the originals returned to the album afterwards.