Celebrating 140 Years of Caring: Nursing Through the Years at the Queen's Medical Center

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Nina Cook Miss Cook was one of the first trained nurses to practice in Hawaii. She arrived on a sailing vessel from California in 1892. Queen's paid her annual salary of $50.00 in gold coins. Her tenure at Queen's ended in 1895 when she married a patient, Henry Ovenden of London. The couple moved to Hana, Maui, where she is now buried.

According to a January 6, 1893 Minority Report from Charles L. Carter to the Queen's Board of Trustees, nurses' duties were to "to wait upon the patients, soothing them and applying their wants, reporting to the doctors and carrying out their orders, do the cleaning of the building, the mending, sewing, and washing of the bedding and the table linen of the hospital and the clothing of the patients." For nurses, twenty-four hour duty without relief was the rule. Rest and meals were acquired in a sketchy manner.

1910 Laura Sax, head nurse, is seated in the center.

Having difficulty securing trained nurses outside the islands, the Queen's Board of Trustees decided to open their own nursing training school, focusing their recruitment efforts on Hawaiian women. In January 1916 Queen's opened the doors of its Training School with a class of ten women, with Agnes Collins as the director. The course of study was soon increased from two to three years, including a three month probation. The first graduate was part-Hawaiian Annie Chalmers who received her graduation pin from Queen Liliuokalani, whose own motto, "'oni pa'a," was imprinted ever after on all graduation pins. In 1919 ten members of the first class of the school graduated.

First Graduating Class, 1919 Seated (L to R): Mollie Thomas, Miss Smith (Superintendent), Miriam Wright, Katherine Ha. Standing (L to R): Lillian Mitchell, Rose Bishaw, Lena Silva, Madeline Fernandez, Rebecca Kaunamano (Dubachell).

World War I Armistice Day, 1918 Queen's nurses in a victory parade

Class of 1922 From L to R: Misses Pa, Yamamoto, Pilger, Delamere (Director of Nursing), Tackabury, Jackson, Instructor, Crabb, Kaunamano.

Diploma from the Queen's Hospital Training School for Nurses, 1929

1923 Madeline Fernandez, a graduate of the first nursing school class, is pushing the wheelchair. This picture was taken on the lanai of Nalani.

Beginning in 1932, applicants were required to complete a year of preliminary courses at the University of Hawaii. From 1932, the school was referred to as the Queen's Hospital School of Nursing. In 1946 the School decided to admit students directly from high school which caused admissions to soar. Following the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941, a critical nursing shortage remained into the fifties because of the Korean conflict. The trend of nursing training in an academic setting contributed to the close of the school with the Class of 1968 as the last class.

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