Note: If you’re wondering what this is all about, start from the beginning: part 1, part 2.
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Became a Nurse
When she grew older, Virginia Lee’s sense of duty and desire to use her talents constructively took her away from the family home to Johns Hopkins University; and there she graduated in the institution’s fourth class of nursing in 1896.
“Those were hard times and I felt I had to make a living,” explains Miss Virginia Lee, “so I went off to be a nurse. And such a commotion it caused! Friends of my mother’s, among them the Misses Hampton Sr., came to see her and begged her not to let me go.
“You see, their niece — Caroline Hampton, who later married Dr. Halsted, one of the greatest surgeons of the day — was at that time a graduate nurse of Johns Hopkins and they told my mother all the hard things involved in nursing.”
Thirty-four years were to pass before she returned to take up her life once again in the tall tree-shaded McMaster home in Columbia.
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Here’s a photo (from the same article) of Gin-Gin as a nurse during World War I:
Also, a few months ago, I blogged a letter Gin-Gin wrote in the fall of 1918, when she was serving in France. (Side note: I think I was using the word “matriarch” incorrectly in that and other older posts. If anyone was truly a matriarch in the family, it was Mary Jane Macfie McMaster, who had 14 children!)
Stay tuned for part 4, to be posted soon.
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One Response to "“A Century of Living” - part 3"
You may be interested to know that additional archival information about Virginia McMaster Foard, Johns Hopkins Hospital School of Nursing Class of 1896, is available at the Johns Hopkins’ Medical Archives. I look forward to reading more about the life of this Hopkins nurse. Quite a few of the early Hopkins nurses lived long and productive lives.
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