By Terri Jo Ryan

Tribune-Herald staff writer

Imagine an era of nursing in Waco’s past when nurses cut their own sponges, rolled their own bandages, patched surgical gloves with rubber cement, washed and boiled glass syringes for repeated use, and sharpened their needles with files.

For the nurses who served Hillcrest Baptist Medical Center from the 1940s through the ’60s, that bygone era was their prime time. They learned medicine on the job, under intense pressure, through observation and participation in patient care.

“We were religious about two things, Jesus and germs,” said Fern White, who graduated with the last class of World War II era Cadet Nurses in September 1948.

“And the doctors were treated like gods in those days. The second a doctor appeared in the room, you had to stand up and snap to (attention),” said White, 80, who retired as a school nurse in the Pasadena ISD in 1987 after almost 30 years with the district.

The Cadet Nurse program was created by the federal government to ease shortages of trained medical personnel during World War II. Nurses who enrolled before the war’s end in 1945 were allowed to finish their studies with federal funding.

Those were the days of starched white caps, white hose and shoes, white smocks over striped shirts or crisp white dresses, said Ruth B. Steusloff, another September 1948 graduate.

As much as she liked the uniform, she holds no nostalgia for some of the equipment and treatments of that era, such as the iron lung machines and the hot, steamed rags wrapped around young polio patients to soften their limbs for exercise, said Steusloff, 80, who now lives in Golden, Colo.

“We did everything in those days, which is why we learned so much,” said Mary Lightfoot Brewer, 80, a February 1948 graduate of the nursing school.

From its founding until the mid-1930s, the hospital was known as Central Texas Baptist Sanitarium, then Central Texas Baptist Hospital. In 1938, the name was changed to Hillcrest Memorial Hospital because of the increasing number of memorial gifts from the community.

In 1963, it was changed to Hillcrest Baptist Hospital, according to its state historical marker. The hospital’s last class at the nursing school graduated in 1971. In 1982, the hospital became Hillcrest Baptist Medical Center.

tjryan@wacotrib.com

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