Early Career
With no formal training, Maxwell first entered the nursing field as a matron at New England Hospital in 1874. She left in 1876 and spent two years in England before enrolling at Boston City Hospital Training School for Nurses. In 1880 she was hired to start a training school at Montreal General Hospital. In 1881, she was offered the superintendency of the Training School for Nurses at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. In 1889, she moved to New York to be director of nursing at St. Luke's Hospital, and from there became superintendent of nursing at the Presbyterian Hospital of New York from 1892-1921. Maxwell was also the first director of the Presbyterian Hospital's nursing school, founded in 1892, which later became the Columbia University School of Nursing. Eleanor Lee writes in the "History of the School of Nursing of the Presbyterian Hospital, New York, 1892-1942", that Maxwell, born in New York but of Scottish descent, was recruited for the position by Mr. John Stewart Kennedy, a wealthy Scottish financier who was then serving as the Presbyterian Hospital's President of the Board of Trustees. In the school's early years, Mr. Kennedy donated $1 million for construction of a dormitory for the nurses.
Read more about this topic: Anna Maxwell
Famous quotes containing the words early and/or career:
“Our instructed vagrancy, which has hardly time to linger by the hedgerows, but runs away early to the tropics, and is at home with palms and banyans—which is nourished on books of travel, and stretches the theatre of its imagination to the Zambesi.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)
“A black boxer’s career is the perfect metaphor for the career of a black male. Every day is like being in the gym, sparring with impersonal opponents as one faces the rudeness and hostility that a black male must confront in the United States, where he is the object of both fear and fascination.”
—Ishmael Reed (b. 1938)