Crest of the St. Joseph's School of Nursing, Hotel Dieu Hospital, Kingston
Sister St. Charles, Foundress of the St. Joseph's School of Nursing, Hotel Dieu Hospital, Kingston
From the founding of the Hotel Dieu Hospital in Kingston in September of 1845 to the early twentieth century, the Religious Hospitallers of St. Joseph provided all the nursing care at the hospital as well as performing all of the administrative functions.
As the hospital expanded following the move into the Regiopolis College building at the end of 1892, the number of patients increased exponentially: between 1845 and 1910, the Hotel Dieu treated approximately 35,000 patients; in next decade, from 1910 to 1920, an extraordinary 19,906 patients were admitted.
It became clear that the Sisters could no longer tend to all their patients by themselves. The author of the community Annals wrote: “The hospital being nearly always filled with patients, night and day, duty constance [sic] and arduous, our Community thought it wise to organize a Training School for Nurses, as the sisters were becoming weakened by the excessive labors.”
Sister St. Charles (Louise O'Connor) was tasked with founding a Training School for Nurses in Kingston and in 1912 she was sent to the St. Bernard Hospital in Chicago, which established its school in 1906, to learn how to operate a school for lay nurses.
The first three classes of the Hotel Dieu Hospital Training School for Nurses. (ca. Aug. 1914)
The first two lay women to being their training at the Hotel Dieu were Anne and Jeanette Legree of Cornwall. They started their training at the Hotel Dieu sometime in late 1911 or early 1912, most likely following the system used to train the Sisters.
In June 1913, they their third year and were joined by Betty Carlon, who had completed two years of training at the St. Vincent de Paul School in Brockville. These three would complete their last year of training under the Superintendent, Miss Alice Donihee and, on August 31st, 1914 they received their diplomas from the Archbishop, becoming the first graduates of the Training School.
The first group of first-year students, the Class of 1916, also began their training in 1913.
St. Joseph's School of Nursing, Hotel Dieu Hospital, Kingston, Class of 1974
The Ontario government mandated that all hospital-based diploma nursing programmes be transferred to Colleges of Applied Arts and Technology in 1973. The final class of the St. Joseph's School of Nursing, the Class of 1974, spent their first year at the Hotel Dieu and they completed their second year at St. Lawrence College.
In total, 1695 nurses graduated from the School in its 62 year history.
