We mark the passing of one of our first students, Anne Pickett Adams. According to her obituary in the Waterbury, CT, Republican American:
She later went on to join the first nursing class at the University of Connecticut and graduated with honors in 1947. She was also a member of the U.S. Cadet Nurse Corps for World War II. While working at Hartford Hospital
Anne Pickett Adams, Class of 1947
as a nurse, she met Ned Arthur Adams of East Hartford, Conn., and they were married in June of 1953 at the First Congregational Church of Washington, Conn.
Each fall term, Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor Cheryl Tatano Beck, a world-renowned qualitative and mixed-methods researcher, introduces UConn School of Nursing Ph.D. students to historic archives and documents in her qualitative methods course.
Dr. Cheryl Beck examining vintage photographs from the Dolan Collection
Preparing her students in advance with a discussion of alumna Mary Ann Cordeau’s 2000 doctoral comprehensive examination paper “The Water-Cure Experiences of the Wolcott Family,” Beck arranges for a tour of the UConn Archives and Special Collections with Betsy Pittman, University Archivist and the archivist for nursing history collections.
Pittman provides manuscript material, part of the Josephine A. Dolan Collection of Nursing History, related to Ella Wolcott, who was both a nurse and a patient in the nineteenth century, which students review in a study room of the Thomas Dodd Center.
The doctoral students in Introduction to Qualitative Methodology (this semester including a student from the School of Business) “look through two archival cartons of historical documents of the Wolcott family and see the actual papers, letters, and photographs” on which Cordeau’s study was based, Beck explains. “Historical research comes alive for them.”
Dr. Beck and Ph.D. students in the qualitative methods seminar examine nineteenth-century Dolan Collection documents provided by Archivist Betsy Pittman.
Archivist Pittman explains, “The materials in the Dolan Collection pertaining to Civil War nursing are the most frequently requested nursing materials we hold.” And she also reminds us that this “collection also complements our ongoing interest in documenting the experiences of nurses during times of war or military nurses, particularly those with an association to the University of Connecticut or Connecticut in general.”
Uniforms depicted are from the Dolan Collection of Nursing History, on display in the Widmer Wing. For more information on the UConn School of Nursing veterans, visit the Nursing War Veteran Oral History Collection.
