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81 chapter 4 Healing Touch: The Nursing Program at Sherman Institute Jean A. Keller At Sherman Institute nurses constituted both the strongest and weakest components of medical care. Nurses provided the majority of patient care on a daily basis, but it was difficult at first to find and retain nurses who were both competent and could manage the heavy workload. Turnover was high and longterm stability was lacking; student health care often suffered as a result. This situation changed in 1907, when a student nursing program was created at the school. Although instruction and supervision of the student nurses placed an additional burden on the resident nurse, the extra help she received in tending to the health care needs of students more than compensated for this. Over the following fifty years, the nursing program at Sherman Institute evolved and ultimately strayed far from the original intentions of its creator but, despite all its permutations, provided genuine career opportunities for its graduates. It accomplished more than this, however as designed in 1907, Sherman Institute’s nursing student program recognized the intelligence and talent of Indian girls, and brought them out of the realm of “domestic science” to which they had been relegated for decades in the boarding school system. Early off-reservation boarding schools gave little thought to student health. Since rapid assimilation of Indian youth into white society was their primary goal, the focus was simply on gathering as many children into the schools as quickly as possible, so that education and consequently assimilation could begin. During the last decade of the nineteenth century, however, it became abundantly clear that in order to educate and assimilate Indian children successfully, particular attention had to be paid to keeping them healthy. By the time Sherman Institute opened in 1902, student health had become a priority issue in the Indian Office. Yet at Sherman Institute, as at most off-reservation boarding schools, nurses, not medical doctors, provided the vast majority of student health care. In large part this was a budgetary issue—physicians cost more than nurses. But perhaps more than that, it resulted from the particular orientation of Commissioner of Indian Affairs William A. Jones eager to 82 The Indian School on Magnolia Avenue replace all Indian Service school physicians with professionally trained nurses supplemented by contract physicians. He felt that trained nurses would provide better health care than staff physicians, although he never articulated the basis for his opinion.1 Sherman Institute never had a staff physician, instead relying on a part-time contract physician. The standard contract for the part-time physician required that he visit the school whenever school officials needed his professional services and, at a minimum, required him to visit the school at least three times per week for the purpose of improving sanitary and hygienic conditions. In addition to the contract physician, the Indian Office hired a resident nurse for the school, who had full responsibility for the daily medical care of both students and employees between the physician’s visits. The nurse lived at the medical care facility, which was located in one of the girls’ dormitories, Ramona House, until the Indian Office provided funds for hospital buildings in 1905 and 1912. In this way, the resident nurse was available to provide roundthe -clock care to patients. Although the nurse theoretically received one day off each week, in reality this rarely occurred since there was no one else to provide medical care. Even when the contract physician was at the school, the resident nurse was expected to assist him in providing patient care. Initially, the resident nurse received a salary of $600 per year, the same amount as most of the school’s teachers, the seamstress, the baker, and the cook.2 Although provided a room in the hospital, the resident nurse paid for her board at the “employee mess” or dining room, as did all Sherman Institute staff. Between 1902 and 1907, the resident nurse had little assistance, except during a 1904 epidemic of typhoid fever. For the one-month duration of the epidemic and recovery period, Superintendent Harwood Hall hired an assistant resident nurse and five “irregular” nurses to help care for the 35 children stricken with the disease.3 The remainder of the time the resident nurse was virtually on her own as far as patient care, since the contract physician, Dr. A. S. Parker, spent little time at the school. During its first five years of operation, Sherman Institute had at...

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