Alice Fitzgerald

Early Life

Alice Fitzgerald was born in Florence, Italy on March 13, 1874. During her lifetime, she became fluent in French, German, Italian, and English. At the age of 19, she attended Johns Hopkins’ School of Nursing in Baltimore, MD.

At the time, nursing was one of the only acceptable female occupations and nursing training schools began to appear across the United States following the Civil War. After Fitzgerald graduated in 1906, she assisted in earthquake relief efforts in Messina, Italy, as a member of the Florence Branch of the Italian Red Cross.

Fitzgerald returned to Johns Hopkins in 1909 as a head nurse, later leaving in December 1910 to become the head nurse at Bellevue Hospital in New York. She went on to become the superintendent of nurses at Wilkes-Barre General Hospital in Pennsylvania in August 1912. Following this, Fitzgerald migrated to Indiana to become the director of a newly established nursing school: the IU Training School for Nurses.

Career

Established in 1914, the IU Training School for Nurses was the 15th nursing school to open in Indiana. The dean of the IU Medical School, Charles P. Emerson, hired Fitzgerald to be the school’s first director.

When Fitzgerald came to Indiana, construction for Long Hospital had finally been completed. IU began building Long Hospital in 1911, in an unattractive area west of the city dump which made it difficult to start up the nursing program. Although the hospital was “lonely and small,” Fitzgerald remained undaunted and she immediately went to work to create the best nursing program she could.

Under her leadership, Fitzgerald equipped the hospital with the best possible technologies and planned the nursing school. One of her first goals as director was to ensure that nursing students could receive university credit for their work; this would allow students to reduce the amount of time needed to earn their bachelor and nursing degrees. Fitzgerald also planned the curriculum: students had to complete coursework in topics such as biology, hospital hygiene, and preventative medicine while completing practical work.

Fitzgerald also designed the nurses’ uniforms and caps that designated their ranks: probationary nurses wore a pink uniform, pupil nurses wore a dark gray chambray uniform, and graduate nurses wore a white uniform with 36 small pearl buttons, with an all-white percale cap with five tucks.

During her tenure, Fitzgerald oversaw the admittance of the first nursing students. The initial school’s staff was small: there was one instructor, two head nurses, a night supervisor, and operating room supervisor, and seven staff nurses. In its first year, the training school admitted five students.

Although the admission requirements appeared to be strict they followed the guidelines established by the country’s best nursing training schools. Despite her short-lived career at the hospital, Fitzgerald set the foundations for an extraordinary nursing program that continues to flourish to this day.

After leaving her position as director of the Nurses’ Training Program, Alice Fitzgerald served as an American nurse with the British Expeditionary Forces in France, aiding soldiers wounded in World War I. When the United States joined the war, she resigned from her position and joined the American Red Cross; she served in France as chief nurse and in Italy as an aid for Venetian refugees. After the war, Fitzgerald stayed in Europe and served as the Chief Nurse of the American Red Cross Commission in Europe.

Fitzgerald was dedicated to aiding nursing efforts around the world. She organized local nursing schools and public health nursing services in many countries: Poland, the Philippines, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Montenegro, and Albania.

She also created the International School for Public Health Nurses for the Florence Nightingale International Foundation in London. For her dedication and hard work, she received a Florence Nightingale Medal from the Red Cross and decorations from China, England, France, Serbia, Poland, Italy, Russia, and Hungary for her work.

Legacy

After Fitzgerald returned to the United States, she held other nursing positions. She was the director of nurses in New York at the Polyclinic Hospital from 1930-1936. Although she resigned from the position to write her memoirs and raise marmosets, she remained active in nursing.

She worked as a housemother at the Shepard Pratt Hospital’s home for nurses in Baltimore, MD until she retired in 1948. Fitzgerald moved to New York City, where she remained for the rest of her life. She died on November 10, 1962.

Bibliography

“Alice Fitzgerald Collection,” The Alan Mason Chesney Medical Archives of the Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions. URL: https://medicalarchives.jhmi.edu:8443/papers/fitzgerald.html.

IU Trustee Minutes, Indiana University Archives, Bloomington.

Marriner-Tomey, Ann. ed. Nursing at Indiana University: 75 Years at the Heart of Health Care (Indiana University School of Nursing: Indianapolis, 1989).

Owen, Mary. “Alice Fitzgerald,” Women in Medicine at Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis.

“This Way Forward: Alice Fitzgerald (1876-1962). Johns Hopkins Nursing. https://magazine.nursing.jhu.edu/2014/07/this-way-forward-alice-fitzgerald-1876-1962/.

Awards and decorations

Florence Nightingale Medal

French Honour medal for courage and devotion

Medal of French Gratitude

Silver Medal of the Polish Red Cross

Serbian Red Cross medal

Italian Red Cross Disaster Relief medal

Russian Red Cross medal

British Royal Red Cross medal

British Campaign medal

British Victory medal