School of Nursing: Connections

A visit from Annie Goodrich

From a talk by Dean Emeritus Soule to Florence Gray’s N.200 Class on August 10, 1959. Annie Warburton Goodrich was dean of the first nursing program in the country at Yale University and president of the American Nurses’ Association from 1915-1918.

" ... Annie Goodrich ... was a woman with a very wonderful mind and knew how to use it ... But the thing that was most interesting to me about her was that she was also such an ordinary human being. (In) the summer of 1922 when we had our national pioneering convention here in Seattle, Miss Goodrich was going to be the key speaker. ... So I decided, well, why not have her come to summer school? So I sent her a telegram and she accepted. ... She was a little woman, very delicate-looking, had a little bit of a limp; I thought she looked as though the first breath of air would blow her away. So I thought I must find a place near the campus ... where she can get breakfast, because she can’t walk very far. So I found this place. Then registration day came. In those days we registered all students in one day - the whole university. And we sat there all day. The day before registration this woman called me up and said she was sorry she couldn’t take Miss Goodrich because she had sold her house. So I didn’t know what to do. ... I called the Dean of Women and ... she said, ‘Well, there’s a vacancy in Clark Hall. Take her over there for the night anyway, and tomorrow you can go out and hunt for something for her." So Miss Goodrich arrived while I was registering, in a taxi with her trunk on behind. I explained the situation and apologized ... and went over with her ... Clark Hall was very old even in those days, very primitive. There was no running water in the rooms. You had to trail down to the middle section there where all the toilets were. There were no rugs on the floor and no drapes at the windows. It was just a bare room. I took her in and she said she’d fix herself up, so I went back to my registration. In about a half an hour she was over to help me. The first thing she said was, ‘You don’t need to bother to find another room for me. There’s a beautiful tree outside my window. I want to stay there all summer.’ So she stayed in Clark Hall all summer. . . and I got to know her very well and she helped me a lot. Afterwards, whenever I went East - she was at Yale at that time and had a nice little house there - she would always have me come to stay overnight with her."

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