Correspondence, memoranda, reports, financial records, memoirs, curriculum materials, printed matter, and blueprints documenting the history of the Columbia University School of Nursing, founded in 1892 as the Presbyterian Hospital Training School for Nurses.

Among the topics documented are the founding of the school; the work of its graduates during the Spanish-American War and the First and Second World Wars; the affiliation with Columbia University in the 1930s; fundraising for and construction of Anna Maxwell Hall, the School of Nursing home from 1928 to 1984; extensive records relating to curriculum; and much biographical material on the school’s directors/deans through 1976.

The correspondence includes much that originated in the records of the school’s deans and of the presidents of Presbyterian Hospital.  Since few dean’s records exist before the 1960s and no Presbyterian Hospital president’s records appear to have survived at all, this collection probably includes the only body of records relating to the school’s first four decades.

Internal evidence shows that the majority of these records were created by Eleanor Lee as working files for her two histories of the School of Nursing, History of the School of Nursing of the Presbyterian Hospital, New York, 1892-1942 (1942) and Neighbors, 1892-1967: A History of the Department of Nursing, Faculty of Medicine, Columbia University, 1937-1967, and its predecessor, the School of Nursing of the Presbyterian Hospital, New York, 1892-1937 (1967). They were then passed on to Gary Goldenberg who used them in writing the third history of the school, Nurses of a Different Stripe: A History of the Columbia University School of Nursing, 1892-1992 (1992).

Goldenberg added to the collection including both material for the post-1967 era as well as additional items to the existing files, largely photocopies of pages from the Alumni Association’s publication, The Quarterly Magazine and its successors.