“A Place for the Better Technical Education of Nurses”: The Dublin Metropolitan Technical School for Nurses, 1893–1969

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Founded on December 16, 1893 to provide place for the better technical education of nurses in the Dublin Metropolitan Technical School for Nurses is reputed to have been the first centralized nurse training school in the world.1 At the time the School was founded, training schools for nurses in the Nightingale tradition had been established at all the principal voluntary hospitals in Dublin. However, these schools existed in a nominal sense only, and they generally did not operate as separate institutions with a formal curriculum. As local training schemes, the hospital training schools provided a schedule of lectures that were normally delivered during the probationers' rest periods. This system could not always guarantee that instruction would be delivered as planned, as it was vulnerable to the vagaries of the clinical situation in busy hospitals. With its standardized curriculum, the Dublin Metropolitan Technical School for Nurses offered the hospitals of Dublin a program of systematic teaching and uniform examinations on a centralized basis. Probationers and trained nurses from most of the large voluntary hospitals and some of the smaller specialist hospitals attended the three-year program, which the School conducted at one or more sites in the center of Dublin. Founded by Ireland's most influential nursing leader, Margaret Rachel Huxley,2 and by a number of other senior physicians, and surgeons in Dublin, the School came into being at a time when hospital nursing reform in Dublin was all but complete. The Nightingale system had been introduced into Ireland, replacing untrained nurses with lady nurses, young, educated, middle-class women who received probationer nurse training of the type offered by the London voluntary hospitals. The establishment of the School, with its formal, regularized curriculum consolidated the reforms that had been achieved up to that time. It was also part of the strategy of the advocates of state registration to demonstrate the benefits of such a system. As a central school offering uniform instruction and examinations, the Dublin Metropolitan Technical School provided the prototype for a regulated system of nurse training. The School was founded at a time when the campaign for the advancement of women's education was beginning to secure a tenuous foothold in areas of higher education, albeit on the basis of extant constructions of womanhood and their putative educational needs. Through the operation of guilds and apprenticeships and the propagation of scientific treatises on women's physical and mental inferiority, higher education remained for the most part the preserve of men.3 In the broader context of the women's education movement of the time, therefore, the School presented a unique example of an educational institution for women. The principal voluntary hospitals in Dublin maintained affiliation with the Dublin Metropolitan Technical School, taking advantage of its program of lectures and examinations until the School ceased to operate in 1969. This article critically examines the history of an institution that played an integral part in the education of nurses in Dublin for more than 75 years and considers the School's contribution to the development of modern nursing in Ireland. It is based on the Minutes of Proceedings of the Governing Authority of the School and related documentary primary sources.4 Background to the Establishment of the School: Health Care in Dublin in the Late 19th century Medical care for the sick poor of Ireland in the 19th century was provided through voluntary and state systems that became more organized as the century progressed. State provision of relief was through structures for outdoor relief, including a public dispensary service and a domiciliary nursing service, and institutions for indoor relief, comprising county infirmaries, fever hospitals, lunatic asylums, and workhouse infirmaries.5 Voluntary care took place in the context of Christian charity and philanthropy, including that offered by Catholic sisterhoods and voluntary hospitals. …