Chapter 08: Building Nursing Education
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Identifier
HilkemeyerR_01_20000523_C08
Publication Date
5-23-2000
Publisher
The Historical Resources Center, Research Medical Library, The University of Texas Cancer Center
City
Houston, Texas
Keywords
Building the Institution; Building/Transforming the Institution; Education; On Education; Leadership; On Leadership; Mentoring; On Mentoring; Overview; Definitions, Explanations, Translations; MD Anderson Culture Research, Care, and Education; Building/Transforming the Institution; Growth and/or Change; MD Anderson History; MD Anderson Impact; MD Anderson Impact; Survivors, Survivorship; Patients, Treatment, Survivors; Understanding Cancer, the History of Science, Cancer Research; The History of Health Care, Patient Care; Cancer and Disease
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.
Disciplines
History of Science, Technology, and Medicine | Oncology | Oral History
Transcript
Renilda Hilkemeyer, RN, BS, Dr.P.H.:
In addition to that, we had a lot of educational things going on for the staff as far as nursing was concerned. So much so that we, half the time, didn't have enough space to do it in because not only were we teaching our own staff but we had students who came from the universities here as well. When we got ready to do the planning for that and we put in our proposal of what we wanted, it was a lot, but we got a total classroom situation with a bedside unit, we got the classrooms that we needed and we got the teaching space that we needed. And so, we came out very good with that. As a matter of fact, they were in Washington to justify the proposals, and I got called the night before ... 'is it true you really have x number of classes going on at this time?' I said, "Yes, I've got the forms right in front of me. I can tell you how many different things go on at our place all the time." And the students like to come here also because they can go to class as well as their own people.
Louis J. Marchiafava, PhD:
What students were these now?
Renilda Hilkemeyer, RN, BS, Dr.P.H.:
These were from Texas Woman's University, which was the first one here. And then after that, the University of Texas School of Nursing. The Texas Woman's University came into the Center first because UT didn't want any part of it. They didn't need it. They had a school down in Galveston 40 miles down the road, and that is what they were interested in. So, we did take students and we actually had them for clinical experience here. But the other thing that we did in the summer time, when I had vacant positions in my aide group, for example, we got students lined up and we, among us in the Medical Center, decided that if you had a student at X level, these were the kinds of things they could do. X level could do this. Sophomore. Junior. Senior. And so, we took our aide positions for the summer and we didn't fill them with aides, we took students. And that was a real good recruitment device for us because we paid them, used our ed[ucation] money, and paid them, and hired another instructor or two. And then, two years in a row, I got money from the American Cancer society and we had 60 students that we had here for six weeks in the summer time. And they gave us instructors and we paid their salary. So, I was always trying to find places that students would be interested in because students looked at cancer as the worst possible job you could have. And so, that was known nationally and internationally. And so, it was another area that we were trying to look at to interest students in being with us. And they did. They came and a lot of them stayed and were on our staff. So, that was good for us, too.
Louis J. Marchiafava, PhD:
The whole issue of cancer, as I would imagine, especially in the early days as you talked about before, it had a very negative connotation, even more than now and it still does now.
Renilda Hilkemeyer, RN, BS, Dr.P.H.:
Well, but in the early days, people felt that this was just a death warrant. And in actuality, statistically, it was pretty bad because you had less than 20% survivors in the 1940s and 1950s. And now, you've got at least 80%, and in a lot of areas, more than that. In addition to that, I had to talk about this the other morning: When I was leaving, because they wanted me to talk something about cancer, the dreadful disease… and the other thing I was pointing out to them was there was also a fear of cancer. If you had an open lesion, people thought you were contagious because they thought that was a problem. If you were being treated with radiotherapy, they felt that you were radioactive when you got home and they were afraid to let your spouse sleep with you or something like that. So, the newspapers did not use the word cancer. You died from a lingering illness but no cancer. We didn't have anybody out there trying to promote the idea that cancer could be cured or that you ought to get there early. The earliest possible stuff was the Cancer Society in about 1940. They had the seven danger signals, and they tried to alert people to those. But beyond that, there just wasn't much there. And think one of the great things that happened when the National Cancer Institute set up the cancer program and people had then started calling in and getting information, and a lot of the physicians did not want to give their patients up. And so, they wouldn't refer them to the cancer hospital here either. That was another thing. Some physicians would not do the radical surgery that was needed because they were afraid that the patient might not accept that. Some physicians did not want to order too much narcotics because they thought you would be an addict. So, there were all sorts of things like that . . .I mentioned these things the other morning because they asked me to talk about what went on between 1950 and 1970. And the only reason I got the assignment was I was the only one still walking around living that could do it!
Nurses were just as scared of cancer as the patients were. They thought it was too depressing to work. It was very difficult to recruit people. They didn't want to work in a cancer hospital. They didn't want to take care of cancer patients, because it was too depressing. And you did see terrible things but, you know, it wasn't all that bad, so somebody had to do it, too, if you looked at it that way.
Recommended Citation
Hilkemeyer, Renilda RN, BS, Dr.P.H. and Marchiafava, Louis J. PhD, "Chapter 08: Building Nursing Education" (2000). Interview Chapters. 1602.
https://openworks.mdanderson.org/mchv_interviewchapters/1602
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