Germantown Dispensary and Hospital correspondence

This small collection of correspondence relates to and documents some of the activies of the Germantown Dispensary and Hospital during the years 1903 tp 1908. Much of the correspondence is between doctors T. H. Shoemaker and Burton Chance regarding Chance's appointment as Ophthalmologist of the Hospital. Other letters involve the assigments and resignations of other staff members.

The Germantown Dispensary (later Germantown Dispensary and Hospital) opened modestly in one room in 1864, an initiative of the prominent physician James. E. Rhoads (1828-94). Germantown Hospital was incorporated in 1870 as a dispensary and hospital for free advice and medicine, to nursing care at home or in the hospital and prevention of disease and restoration to health for the poor and of Germantown and immediate vicinity. A School of Nursing, that had been envisioned when the hospital had 50 beds, opened in 1892. It became a three-year course in 1895. By 1908 there were 35 nurses in the training school. After a decline in the 1950s, the number of students rebounded. LaSalle College affiliated with the School of Nursing in 1969 to facilitate the degree-granting trend.

In 1902 the Nurses’ Alumnae Association was organized.

The Germantown Hospital School of Nursing was closed in 1998. In 1999 an announcement was made that the in-patient acute care patients of Germantown Hospital would be moved to Albert Einstein Medical Center and the hospital premises would be used as a skilled care nursing facility.

Previously catalogued as 10a 390.

Sources:

Farr, Gail E. and Bethany Myers. Germantown Hospital and Community Health Services records (MC 183). University of Pennsylvania: Barbara Bates Center for the Study of The History of Nursing. Accessed 5 December 2019.

Peitzman, Steven J. "Dispensaries." The Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia. Accessed 5 December 2019.