New Widmer Exhibit

The UConn School of Nursing’s permanent exhibit case honoring founding dean Carolyn Ladd Widmer has been renovated for the 75th anniversary.

Carolyn Ladd Widmer Exhibit
Carolyn Ladd Widmer Exhibit

It features text from Widmer, her sons, and her grandson —

“But over the years, earlier in particular, what would amaze me, and this was unexpected but then it became commonplace for me, those women from the early years would come up to me and they’d each have different stories. But almost to a person, they’d say, ‘Mike, your mother changed my life. Your mother changed my life.’ And then they’d tell me their story. Dozens. And if dozens have told me, there are hundreds if not thousands of women out there (because it was mostly women in those days) whose lives were changed because of her. And I think that’s one of her great legacies, which can get lost around the institution and the academics, and that I think was a huge motivation for her.” Michael Widmer, 2015.

“It wasn’t the easiest job in the world for a single mother. On the one hand, someone who insisted on putting hot meals three times a day in front of my brother and me and attending to her motherly duties, which I think she found very satisfying, fulfilling to herself. On the other hand, trying to establish a school of nursing that would do all of those things in the way that the profession of nursing was developing in those years, which of course for many professional nurses meant that you had to itemize all of those skills. And the things a nurse would need to know how to do but might neglect or at least not put in first place, the humanistic ones.” Eric Widmer, 2015.

“My late grandmother Carolyn Ladd Widmer was a lifelong traveler, and spent long stretches of her life in South America and Lebanon, working in public health and education. She seemed to never stop learning, and her overflowing rooms were another early source of inspiration. At some point in adolescence, I discovered that her grandfather Cyrus Hamlin was the founder of Robert College in Istanbul, a factoid that escaped much notice from me until I turned to the writing of this book.  . . . I have benefited greatly from this strangely insistent web of international influences.” Historian Ted Widmer, Ark of the Liberties: America and the World, 2008.

“When Grandfather asked the chief physician [at the hospital in Scutari where Florence Nightingale worked] why the patients could not have clean clothing, he was told that no satisfactory laundry facilities had been found, that the clothing was too filthy to be cleaned anyway, and that ‘every man had better mind his own business.’ ‘I thought,’ says the missionary, ‘that in such a scene of suffering . . . it was my “own business” to mitigate it.’” Carolyn Ladd Widmer, “Grandfather and Florence Nightingale,” American Journal of Nursing, 1955.

“Such is the spirit and such are the problems of the housewife nurses who are again taking up active duty. It is an unquenchable spirit, but alone it cannot solve all of the problems which these nurses are facing. Inasmuch as last year it was my pleasure and privilege to teach refresher courses to inactive graduate nurses and since I am myself the mother of two small children, I have had some contact with these difficulties. When at the beginning of one class hour I started to take my lesson plan from its folder (which I had had at home the night before) and drew forth instead The Tale of Peter Rabbit, the class realized that they were not alone in finding it difficult always to keep home and hospital from encroaching on each other.” Carolyn Ladd Widmer, “The Housewife Re-enters Nursing,” American Journal of Nursing, 1943.