A small window on Janet Doe's life

Sherri Fuller's recent Janet Doe lecture [1] reminded me of an interesting interlude in Janet Doe's life that might be worth sharing with readers of the Bulletin of the Medical Library Association. I encountered this information quite unexpectedly while organizing some archival nursing papers at the History and Special Collections Division, UCLA Louise M. Darling Biomedical Library. Libraries were not Janet Doe's first professional goal and, but for a minor physical weakness, we might have been deprived of one of the great figures of our professional history.

At the time of patriotic fervor accompanying the United States' entry into World War I and a general desire to aid the war effort, Janet Doe entered a summer pre-nursing training program at Vassar College in June 1918 [2]. This three-month program was organized partly because of immediate needs but also grew out of the long-range dreams of nursing-education leaders for an academic-based education of professional nurses. The training camp for nurses was organized under the auspices of the National Council of Defense, with funding from the American Red Cross, for the “establishment and maintenance of a school of science applied to trained nursing at Vassar College during the summer of 1918” [3]. The intent was to draw female college graduates into critically understaffed wartime nursing ranks. Four hundred and thirty young women from 117 different colleges gathered for “a summer school for intensive theoretical training of hospital nurses” [4]. A prestigious faculty, recruited for the summer from major eastern universities and hospitals, provided instruction in anatomy, physiology, bacteriology, chemistry, dietetics and cookery, hygiene, practical nursing, history and social aspects of nursing, elementary materia medica, and psychology. From Vassar, the trainees then went on to established hospital training programs, where their time to graduate with a nursing diploma was reduced from the normal three years to two years.

Janet Doe had graduated from Wellesley in 1917 as a science major, and she entered the Vassar training program with twenty-six other alumnae of her school. The biographer of the camp commented: “Camp members will remember how she led the Red Cross Parade down the main street of Poughkeepsie. She was a beautiful young woman, erect, six feet tall” [5].

Immediate heavy ward responsibilities with little training, illnesses, and even some deaths caused by the 1918 influenza epidemic, as well as the change in circumstances brought by the November armistice, cut the total number of probationers who persevered to a final nursing diploma by about half. Janet Doe started hospital training at New York Presbyterian Hospital [6], but had to abandon nursing during her first year there because of a knee problem. Only then did she turn to librarianship. Lucky for our profession!