Reflections on how nursing is and used to be

CHENEY – A lot has changed in the field of medicine.

That includes nursing, and how that has changed is reflected in a book that took 10 former nurses to write — including two who live in the Cheney School District.

Donna Knott Pierce of Marshall and Ruth Martin Van Kuren of Cheney are two of the authors of “Memories Beneath our Cap,” a look at the life and times of the Deaconess Hospital School of Nursing graduating class of 1964. The book provides a glimpse into nursing education in the 1960s through the memories of nurses who began as part of a group of 61 who settle into living in a dorm near Deaconess in 1961 and ended up part of 52 who graduated in August 1964.

The class has remained close over the years, and following their 50th reunion, a group known as the “Breakfast Group of 64” decided they needed to document their experiences and, according to a news release, “especially our friendship of 58 years.”

“It started at a breakfast about two and a half years ago,” Van Kuren said. “We were reminiscing and we said, ‘we ought to write a book.”

Pierce said she, Van Kuren and a couple others began working on documenting the history of the school. According to the booklet “Eight Decades of Progress,” the hospital began as the Maria Beard Deaconess Home of Spokane on April 25, 1896, with the nursing school established in 1899 and graduating its first class in 1901.

The program eventually became affiliated with Whitworth College, today Whitworth University. Ruth Martin (now Van Kuren) and Donna Knott (Pierce) arrived in 1961 from the farming town of Lacrosse, Wash., and settled with their classmates into Letterman Lanning Hall, a building still standing today within walking distance from the expanded hospital.

The book details the recollections of nurses trained under a much more structured living environment and an instructional atmosphere more hands on than nurses receive today. In 1961, nurses lived in Letterman Hall their first year of the three-year course, boarding a bus that took them to Whitworth for classes during the weekdays.

Van Kuren said their second and third-year training all took place in the hospital under supervision. They also gained psychiatric experience working with patients on the wards at Eastern State Hospital in Medical Lake, living in a hall for several days a week on that campus during their training period.

The School of Nursing offered two programs, one that upon completion the graduate became an RN, registered nurse, and the other where the graduate took additional classes, including some at other schools, and received a bachelor’s in nursing. While Van Kuren took the former, Pierce went the latter.

“My aim was to be a public health nurse, to go out into the community,” Pierce said.

The nursing school experience depicted in the book no longer exists, shutting its doors in 1980. At Deaconess, the two women said they roomed with people who would be classmates for the next three years. There were strict hours when students could come and go, a “house mother” who lived on the premise and where getting phone messages meant looking on a community bulletin board to see if you had a note.

“There were lots of adventures from dorm pranks to lessons learned along the way, including interaction with the doctors and interns,” Van Kuren wrote in an email.

Both women said the book was written so that the experiences related would tell the story about how nursing used to be taught, and by consequence how it has changed over time.

“We were taught to be bedside nurses,” Van Kuren said.

Copies of “Memories Beneath our Cap” are available at the gift shops at Deaconess and Valley medical centers as well as Ree Creations in Cheney and Simply Northwest in Spokane.

John McCallum can be reached at [email protected].