Annie Warburton Goodrich was born in 1866 and died in 1954. she saw the nursing and medical professions as equals, independent yet interdependent, each with is own unique body of knowledge. She lived in an age when nurses received their training in hospital schools of nursing, and she sought to introduce nursing to the university and pioneered the inclusion of preventive medicine and community nursing courses in the curriculum.
Annie W. Goodrich was born in New Brunswick, New Jersey in 1866 as the second of seven children. Her father was an insurance executive and her mother the daughter of physician John S. Butler, a pioneer in progressive psychiatry who founded the Hartford Retreat, an institution for the treatment of the mentally ill. Annie abhorred sickness and death and so did not come to nursing for the love of it but rather was brought to the profession by her need to support herself, combined with the lack of options facing women in her time. She attended New York Hospital's Training School for Nurses. Students at the time normally worked 12 hours each day on the wards of the hospital and attended a few evening lectures on clinical subjects. Senior nursing students served as head nurses and guided the new students through their initial experiences on the wards. Goodrich graduated and remained at New York Hospital until 1893, leaving to become superintendent of nurses at New York Postgraduate Hospital, where she became involved in nurse education. In 1900 she became superintendent of nurses at St. Luke's Hospital in New York, where she worked to improve the working and educational environment for the students. She later became general superintendent at the Bellevue and Allied Training Schools for Nursing in New York City (Bullough, Church, and Stein, 1988, 145-146).
During her time as chairman of the committee of the American Society of Superintendents, working to foster the development of the struggling young ...