Cricket201903

LINDA RICHARDS WAS the first graduate of an American nursing
school. After receiving her degree in 1873, she went to work at Bellevue Hospital in
New York City. Katherine Kelly told us an interesting story about her.
As night superintendent at the Bellevue Training School for Nurses, Linda
Richards had to ask the day nurses for reports on the condition of her one hundred
patients.
“You are so full of questions!” cried a day nurse in exasperation. “I could fill a
penny notebook trying to answer them all!”
Linda was full of questions. She’d graduated a year before, and there was still
so much she didn’t know. That night she thought of what the day nurse had said.
Penny notebooks! Well, why not?
At her first opportunity, she tied notebooks to the beds of her most severely ill
patients. She begged the day nurses to keep a written record of each patient’s condi-
tion, and she would do the same at night.
One evening Linda stopped at the bed of a sailor. After watching her write in
the notebook, he asked jokingly if she was trying to chart his course.
Why, that’s exactly what I’m trying to do, she thought. And so began the pro-
cess of keeping a patient’s chart, now used in hospitals and doctors’ offices all over
the world.
Linda Richards went on to become a pioneer in the field of nurses’ training. She
spent her life proving that “a trained nurse is better than an untrained one.” The
American Nurses’ Association honored Linda Richard’s contribution by putting her
image on its seal, surrounded by the words “Service, Humanity, Efficiency.”