Schools

Nell Hodgson Woodruff School of Nursing

William T. Sherman's first visit to Atlanta left the city a mess. But one structure untouched by the conflagration in his wake was the home of Marcus Aurelius Bell. Built in 1860, the building was known as "the Calico House," because its interior walls had been painted to look like the marbleized inside covers of books and resembled a pattern of calico popular at the time. Still standing in 1905 at the southeast corner of Auburn Avenue and Courtland Street, the house became the birthplace of both the Nell Hodgson Woodruff School of Nursing and Emory University Hospital.

The Methodists' North Georgia Conference in 1903 resolved to help raise $200,000 to establish a hospital in Fulton County, with the purpose of "promoting the cause of the Christian religion, education and charity, and particularly for the medical and surgical treatment of all diseases and infirmities whatsoever." As initial fund raising faltered, however, Asa Candler stepped to the rescue. Buying the old Calico House, he had it renovated and a third story added. In 1905 the Wesley Memorial Hospital, as it was called, opened with a handful of community physicians attending, fifty patients, and a training program for the hospitals' nurses. The first students completed their training and received their certificates two years later.

A home for the nursing staff was rented next to Wesley Memorial Church, and another house was bought next to the hospital. These three buildings served as the hospital and nursing school until December 1922, when a new hospital funded by Asa Candler opened on the Druid Hills campus. The twenty-five patients at the Calico House were driven the five miles to Emory in vehicles provided by Atlanta's funeral homes.

With the hospital's move to the Druid Hills campus, the training program for the nurses moved also. For seven years the "school" operated out of quarters in the newly renamed Emory University Hospital. White-capped nurses received their certificates at Emory's June commencements. Then, in 1929, the children of Asa Candler paid for construction of the Florence Candler Harris Home for Nurses (Harris Hall) to honor their aunt, Asa's older sister. This became the home of both the nurses and the nurses' training program until 1953, when growth in nursing enrollment led the administration to devote all of Harris Hall to dormitory use. The school's offices moved into a building then standing on the site of Egleston Hospital, and classrooms were carved out of the hospital. Four years later the school occupied a temporary barracks (now gone) behind the Rich Building, and in 1970 a nearly windowless fortress between the hospital and Woodruff Library became the school's home for the next thirty years.

Curricular changes ushered in a four-year diploma in 1944, when the training program was elevated to status as a school of the University. Eight years later the nursing diploma was replaced by the bachelor of science in nursing program, which required students to take two years of general education in Emory College before transferring to the nursing school. In 1954 the school introduced its first master's degree curriculum, and by the beginning of the next century it was offering the Ph.D. degree. Social changes ushered in the school's first male student in 1962. Emory's first African-American graduates earned their (master's degrees in) nursing … in 1963.

Source:  Hauk, Gary S.  A Legacy of Heart and Mind:  Emory Since 1836.