Welcome to our special Milestone issue of Johns Hopkins Nursing.
Throughout this past year, we have honored our Johns Hopkins nursing history and impressive accomplishments through an array of exciting and diverse commemorative events. Many of you joined us last February for our first event: a standing-room-only “Who Will Care for Us” public symposium hosted by ABC News Correspondent Sam Donaldson. That exhilarating launch created a special “buzz” throughout the Hopkins community about the co-joined crises of an aging America and an ongoing nursing shortage, and set the stage for more than a year of events. Since last February, we’ve celebrated our 115 years of nursing education at Johns Hopkins and commemorated our 20 years as a full division of the university. We’ve recognized our diversity and reaffirmed our values. We’ve shared our innovations in patient safety and quality of care, and have had the privilege of hosting outstanding visiting scholars and lecturers from the United States and abroad.
In May, we will culminate our Milestone commemoration with a second public symposium, “Who Will Care for Us? Who Will Receive Care?” Through an expert-to-expert town hall format—again hosted by Sam Donaldson—we will bring together legislators, other policymakers, and nationally recognized health care experts to examine the health care disparities that so threaten our nation’s urban and rural disadvantaged and minority populations. We invite you to join us in this closing of a truly memorable series of events.
As our commemoration draws to a close, this special issue of Johns Hopkins Nursing joins the celebrations to honor the “then and now” of Hopkins nurses and nursing education. In the pages that follow, we recognize both where we have been and where we are going. We explore the experiences of Hopkins nurses on the frontlines of war through their letters home; we share our collection of nursing uniforms in a photographic review of the Hopkins nursing “look” over the years; and we open the archives to discover just how dramatically the nursing curriculum has changed over the last 115 years. The Vigilando pages recapture the excitement of our Homecoming weekend last October, including the reunion of my own class, and join in the spirit of “then and now” by highlighting several families who now boast generations of Hopkins nurses.
Also with this issue, we launch a new frequency of publication for Johns Hopkins Nursing. Watch your mailbox now for three issues per year—Winter, Summer, and Fall—all of which will include a special Vigilando section featuring our alumni. With each issue, we’ll also bring you stories of our continuing excellence in educating the “Hopkins Nurse,” and news of their accomplishments and the honor these outstanding health care professionals bring to the School of Nursing.
Martha N. Hill, PhD, RN, FAAN ’’64
Dean