Archived Obituaries

Effie I. Graham, Ph.D.

Marguerite L. Manfreda
November 13, 1910- May 14, 2003

In Memory of Mary Blackburn Walsh

Mary Blackburn Walsh, 79, former Director of Academic Programming and Development, School of Nursing, The Catholic University of America, died August 22, 2001 in Hyattsville, MD, of complications of diabetes.

Mary Walsh was born in Germantown, PA and received a diploma in nursing from Mercy Hospital, Johnstown. PA. She served in the US Navy Nurse Corps during World War 11 (1942-1947). She was awarded bachelor and master's degrees in nursing from The Catholic University of America. In 1988, she was awarded an Honorary Doctorate from Old Dominion University, Norfolk, VA.

Mary Walsh served as Instructor, Director of Nursing, University of Michigan, as Instructor, Supervisor, Howard University and Providence Hospital. She was former Director, Robert Wood Johnson Teaching Nursing Home Project and served on the Board of Carroll Manor Nursing Home.

Mary Blackburn Walsh developed and coauthored, with Helen Yura-Petro, The Nursing Process published 5 editions from 1967-1987), Nursing's Human Need Theory, and 3 volumes of Human Needs and The Nursing Process. She was co-author of Nursing Leadership: Theory and Process, and authored and co-authored numerous publications on nursing care of the chronically ill and frail elderly.

Mary Walsh was a longtime member of the American Nurses Association, Sigma Theta Tau International, the American Association for the History of Nursing and Honorary Fellow of the American Academy of Nursing. She received numerous awards: Alumnae Achievement Award, Outstanding Teacher Awards, the Bene Merente Medal, and Book of the Year Award for The Nursing Process.

Her husband Paul Walsh and a daughter Teresa Walsh, RN, both of Hyattsville, MD, survive her. Teresa wrote of her mother "She moved on to a better place on this cloudless day - August 22, 2001 - in her sleep. She traveled to splendid new land we dream about. Her journey was with the same grace and elegance she demonstrated every day of her life - something we all aspire to attain yet may never reach. She was a great lady. Words will never fully divulge the gifts she owned.

Barbara Bates
December 18, 2002

A native of Auburn NY, Dr. Bates earned her BA at Smith College in 1949, then completed medical studies and residency training at Cornell University Medical College in New York City. She practiced as an internist for four years in Greenwich, Connecticut before academic colleagues recruited her to help form the faculty and programs of the new University of Kentucky College of Medicine, where they hoped to improve the quality of medical care as well as provide more health care professionals for the under served Appalachian region. This move began a long career focused on improving the quality and distribution of health care through patient care, teaching, interdisciplinary innovations, research and writing. After six years in Kentucky, Dr. Bates moved to the University of Rochester to oversee education of physicians in ambulatory medicine and to participate in the Rochester Regional Medical Care Program in Western New York. She traveled throughout rural counties to ensure that newer concepts in medical and health care were available to the people of the area.

While at Rochester, Barbara Bates gained national and international recognition as an outstanding Professor of Medicine and an activist in interdisciplinary health care. In the late 1960s she helped conceive and develop the then new role of nurse practitioner, working to improve public access to health care by encouraging greater collaboration between physicians and nurses and expanded practice opportunities for nurses. Her best known book, A Guide to Physical Examination and History Taking, first published in 1974, and continuing under her direction for seven editions, became, and still is, the leading text in its field, published in eleven languages. Her expertise in diagnosis, ability to help novices comprehend the skills of examination and clinical thinking, and influence on improving education for health professionals are probably her most enduring contributions.

In 1976, Dr. Bates joined another innovative medical school, The University of Missouri at Kansas City, which was inaugurating a six year post high school program intended to supply physicians for rural Missouri. There, she served as Senior Docent and Professor for two years.

A long standing interest in the history of medicine and health care led her to complete a masters degree in history at the University of Kansas in 1981. She began researching the history of patients' experiences of tuberculosis, the leading cause of death at the turn of the twentieth century, thereby earning a second master's degree at the University of Pennsylvania. In 1992 she published her award winning study, Bargaining For Life, A Social History of Tuberculosis, 1876-1938. From 1980, until she retired in 1996, Dr Bates held faculty positions at the University of Pennsylvania Schools of Medicine and Nursing and at the Medical College of Pennsylvania and Hahnemann University. An active member of the Section on Medical History at the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, she chaired the section for three years.

Her scholarly honors include admission to Phi Beta Kappa and Sigma XI in 1949 and the medical honor society Alpha Omega Alpha in 1952. A 1961 Diplomate of the American Board of Internal Medicine, Dr. Bates was made Fellow of the American College of Physicians in 1970. She became a Fellow of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia in 1982. Smith College awarded her its Smith College Medal in 1980. In 1984, she received the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing Award for Outstanding Contributions to Education. And, in 1993, the American Association for the History of Nursing awarded her the Lavinia L. Dock Award for Historical Scholarship and Research.

An ardent gardener, bird watcher and hiker, Dr. Bates spent nearly all of her free time outdoors. She enjoyed and supported the rich horticultural opportunities of the Delaware Valley, especially Tyler Arboretum and Jenkins Arboretum. An equally avid fan of opera, she was a long time supporter of the Opera Company of Philadelphia. Her long standing interest in health care history led her to become a major benefactor for the Center for the Study of the History of Nursing at the University of Pennsylvania.

Barbara Bates is survived by her friend, Joan E. Lynaugh of Bryn Mawr, PA, her brother, Dr. Alfred Kelly Bates and sister-in-law Frances, of Center Sandwich, New Hampshire, her brother-in-law, Richard Marshall of Auburn, N.Y., nephews Kelly Bates, Peter Marshall and John Marshall, nieces Eliza Bates, Frances Bates, Hilary Anguita-Bates and Nancy Kohler, and friends Jane Knox of Pittsburgh, PA, Gloria Hagopian of Naples, Florida, Neville Strumpf of Philadelphia, and Karen Buhler-Wilkerson of Philadelphia. She will be missed by many close colleagues in medicine and nursing, and remembered by her many hundreds of former medical and nursing students.

Donations in Barbara Bates' memory may be made to the Barbara Bates Center for the Study of the History of Nursing at the University of Pennsylvania or to the Hospice of the Visiting Nurse Association of Greater Philadelphia.

Lucile Petry Leone

Lucile Petry Leone, the founding director of the U.S. Cadet Nurse Corps, which recruited more than 100,000 young women to study nursing and helped spare the country of the need to draft nurses in World War II, died Nov. 25 at an assisted-living center in San Francisco. She was 97.

As early as the summer of 1941, months before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, there was talk in Washington that it might be necessary to conscript nurses to care for the inevitable high number of casualties there would be should the United States become engaged in a major war.

A less radical alternative -- and a much more politically acceptable one – was temporarily agreed upon. The U.S. Public Health Service would start a program to attract young women at schools throughout the country into nursing. Lucile Petry, a teacher at the University of Minnesota School of Nursing, was chosen to initiate the program.

Two years later, after the United States was at war in both Europe and Asia, Ms. Leone founded and directed the Cadet Nurse Corps, a more formal effort to start women on a path to nursing. The program, authorized by Congress in 1943, offered to cover the cost of a candidate's tuition, fees, room and board, books, monthly stipends and snappy navy-style uniforms.

In exchange, said Ellen Schell, a nursing historian based in San Francisco, candidates had to "promise to participate in essential military or civilian nursing for as long as the war lasted."

The Cadet Nurse Corps proved a success, meeting its recruitment quotas in 1943 and 1944 and outstripping them in the final year of the war, when there were 112,000 cadets in the program. As a consequence, the United States never had to draft nurses into the armed services during the war.

Explaining the success of the Cadet Nurse Corps, Ms. Leone told an interviewer in 1945: "We had a saleable package from the beginning. The girls immediately liked the idea of being able to combine war service with professional education for the future."

She also gave credit to the organization's slogan, "Custodians of the Crises of Life."

In 1949, Ms. Leone became the first woman to direct a division of the U.S. Public Health Service, the Division of Nurse Education. Her rank was equivalent to that of an admiral.

"In that capacity," said Zina Mirsky, assistant dean for administration at the School of Nursing of the University of California at San Francisco, "she established the role of nursing in the federal government -- a presence that still exists."

Ms. Leone retired from government service in 1966 and went on to teach nursing and serve as associate dean at Texas Women's University. She retired again in 1971.

Lucile Petry, the only child of a high school principal and his wife, was born on Jan. 23, 1902, in Frog Heaven, in Preble County, Ohio. She was reared in Selbyville, Del., and after graduating from the University of Delaware in 1924, she received advanced degrees at the Johns Hopkins University School of Nursing in 1927 and Columbia Teachers College in 1929. She taught at the Yale School of Nursing and the University of Minnesota School of Nursing before being summoned to Washington. Ms. Leone's marriage to Nicholas Leone ended in divorce in 1967. She has no immediate survivors.

Hildegard E. Peplau, 89
Nursing Scholar, Educator and Leader

Dr. Peplau is universally regarded as the "mother of psychiatric nursing." Her theoretical and clinical work led to the development of the distinct specialty field of psychiatric nursing. Dr. Peplau''s seminal book, Interpersonal Relations in Nursing (1952), was completed in 1948. Publication was delayed for four years, however, because at that time it was considered too revolutionary for a nurse to publish a book without a physician co-author. Peplau's book has been widely credited with the transformation of nursing from a group of skilled workers to a full-fledged profession. Since the publication of Peplau's work, interpersonal process has been universally integrated into nursing education and nursing practices throughout the United States and abroad. It has been argued that Dr. Peplau's life and work produced the greatest changes in nursing practice since Florence Nightingale.

Dr. Peplau was awarded honorary doctoral degrees from universities including: Alfred, Duke, Indiana, Ohio State, Rutgers, and the University of Ulster in Ireland. Dr. Peplau was named one of "50 Great Americans" in Who's Who in 1995 by Marquis. She was an elected fellow of the American Academy of Nurse and of Sigma Theta Tau, the national nursing honorary society.

Hilda Peplau was born September 1, 1909, in Reading, Pennsylvania, the second daughter of immigrants Gustav and Ottylie Peplau. She was one of six children, having two sisters and three brothers. As a child, she witnessed the devastating flu epidemic of 1918. This personal experience greatly influenced her understanding of the impact of illness and death on families.

Peplau began her career in nursing in 1931 as a graduate of the Pottstown, Pennsylvania School of Nursing. She then worked as a staff nurse in Pennsylvania and New York City. A summer position as nurse for the New York University summer camp led to a recommendation for Peplau to become the school nurse at Bennington College in Vermont. There she earned a bachelor's degree in interpersonal psychology in 1943. At Bennington and through field experiences at Chestnut Lodge, a private psychiatric facility, she studied psychological issues with Erich Fromm, Frieda Fromm-Reichmann and Harry Stack Sullivan. Peplau's lifelong work was largely focused on extending Sullivan's interpersonal theory for use in nursing practice.

From 1943-1945 she served in the Army Nurse Corps and was assigned to the 312th Field Station Hospital in England where the American School of Military Psychiatry was located. Here she met and worked with all the leading figures in British and American psychiatry. After the war, Peplau was at the table with many of these same men as they worked to reshape the mental health system in the United States through the passage of the National Mental Health Act of 1946.

Peplau held master's and doctoral degrees from Teachers College, Columbia University. She was also certified in psychoanalysis by the William Alanson White Institute of New York City. In the early 1950s, Peplau developed and taught the first classes for graduate psychiatric nursing students at Teachers College. Dr. Peplau was a member of the faculty of the College of Nursing at Rutgers University from 1954-1974. At Rutgers, Peplau created the first graduate level program for the preparation of clinical specialists in psychiatric nursing. She was a prolific writer and was equally well known for her presentations, speeches, and clinical training workshops. Peplau vigorously advocated that nurses should become further educated so they could provide truly therapeutic care to patients rather than the custodial care that was prevalent in the mental hospitals of that era. During the 1950s and 12960s, she conducted summer workshops for nurses throughout the United States, mostly in state psychiatric hospitals. In these seminars, she taught interpersonal concepts and interviewing techniques, as well as individual, family and group therapy. Peplau was an advisor to the World Health Organization and was a visiting professor at universities in Africa, Latin America, Belgium, and throughout the United States. A str it had staying power. Her original book from 1952 has been translated into nine languages and in 1989 was reissued in Great Britain by Macmillan of London. In 1989, Springer published a volume of selected works of Peplau from previously unpublished papers. Peplau's ideas have, indeed, stood the test of time. The archives of her work and life are housed at the Schlesinger Library at Harvard University.

Dr. Peplau is survived by Dr. Letitia Anne Peplau and her husband, Dr. Steven Gordon, and their son, David Gordon of Sherman Oaks, CA; sister, Bertha Reppert (Byron), Mechanicsburg, PA; brother, John D. Forster (Dorothy), Reading, PA; niece, Dr. Carolynn Sears (Philip) and children, Jessica and Jacob Sears, Pound Ridge, NY; niece, Marjorie Reppert, Jim Thorpe, PA; niece, Nancy Reppert, Mechanicsburg, PA; niece, Susanna Reppert (David Brill), Mechanicsburg, PA; niece, Karen Bentley (William) and son, William, Sudbury MA; and nephew, Carl Peplau, Hopewell Junction, NY.

The family requests that memorial contributions be made to the Peplau Research Fund; c/o American Nurses Foundation; 600 Maryland Avenue SW, Suite 100; Washington DC 20024-2571 or to the Schlesinger Library; Radcliffe College, Harvard University, 10 Garden Street; Cambridge MA; 02138-3630.

A private family service will be held at a later date. Tributes are being planned by the American Nurses Association, the American Psychiatric Nurses Association, and other nursing organizations.

Prepared by Dr. Grayce Sills with the assistance of Dr. Anne Peplau and Bertha Reppert. Any re-publication is welcomed but copies should be forwarded to either the family or the Schlesinger Library..