Part 2 of the History of St. Francis Hospital
The City of Macomb is no stranger to nursing students.
Still today we have two schools with nursing programs-WIU and Spoon River College. Western Illinois University offers a Bachelors of Science in Nursing (BSN) and Spoon River College a two year associate's degree. Both programs have been popular and their graduates highly successful in finding jobs in the nursing field. Many commute to the two nursing programs while still residing in their homes.
The St. Francis Hospital School of Nursing in Macomb began in 1913. The location of the then ten year old building was where the intersection of West Grant street and North Johnson Street within the St. Francis Hospital complex.
The school was no doubt needed as the demand for nurses was increasing with the hospital's growth.
Welcome to St. Francis School of Nursing
St. Francis Hospital was established in 1903. It was a general hospital which had grown to 100 beds by the late 1940s. The hospital accepted both Catholic and non-Catholic students without discrimination. The school of nursing opening in 1913, was a three-year program, which included a pre-clinical period of four months. Some courses such as chemistry were taken across town at Western Illinois University. During the senior year the nursing students would affiliate with the St. Francis Hospital in Peoria. This included a course in pediatrics.
The St. Francis School of Nursing in Macomb was affiliated with Michael Reese Hospital in Chicago, IL and then in 1933 it affiliated with St. Mary's Hospital in Quincy, IL. Later, St. Francis in Peoria, IL also became an affiliate.
The classes at Macomb' s St. Francis Nursing School were not large, my mother's class had only six. So at any given time there may have been 8-30 student nurses in the programs from 1913-1954.
As mentioned in Part 1, during World War II our military had a dire shortage in trained nurses.
Macomb, Illinois and the St. Francis Hospital were quick to do their part in welcoming 49 student nurses from the U.S. Cadet Nurse Corps.
St. Thaddeus Hall was erected, partly with prisoner labor from Camp Ellis in Fulton County, and housed the visiting nurse trainees. That building still stands on Grant Street. It contained a reception room, 13 double bedrooms, a triple bedroom, directores of nurses rooms and shower facilities.
Still today, on the south side of Thaddeus Hall, one can see a cement cross embedded into an outside wall, a reminder that something very noble and important took place on that site many years ago.
The government, wanting to do its part, furnished the entire Thaddeus Hall with Viking Oak furniture. The government delivered the beds, dressers, tables, chairs, anything to help the Cadet nurses.
It Wasn't a Walk in the Park
Nurses training wasn't easy. Physically, and possibly mentally, it would have been easier to have attended regular college.
Once into the program, it required many hours spent on one's feet. Hours weren't always set-an emergency could cause one's shift to go past a normal day's work.
In many cases, just like my Mother who was a student, tuition money may have been a problem. I haven't the slightest idea how my grandmother came up with $300 to send my mom to nurses training. I asked my mom's sister how they did it, and she said my grandmother saved and saved and saved.
It was called sacrifice-a strong desire to give your child a shot at a better life that yours had turned out to be.
So they wore shoes with holes, didn't paint the house as often as it needed it, and lived life as frugally and as self-sufficiently as they could. They loved to look at the 'wish' booksthe Sears and Roebuck and Montgomery Wards catalogs- but in the end they put them back on the shelf for a time when money wasn't so scarce.
Going off to nurse's training wouldn't have been the same as going off to college and a sorority house these days. The students of St. Francis knew it was serious business. Not only was it the money their parents were spending. It was the fact that they knew their parents believed in them. Also-nursing was a wide-open profession giving the huge shortage. They were, for the most part, hired before they graduated, pending state boards. Job security was a given.
