Annie Goodrich: First Woman Dean

Dean Goodrich surrounded by faculty and student nurses at the 25th anniversary celebration of the School of Nursing on February 5, 1949.

Annie Goodrich (1866-1954), circa 1918-1919

In 1920, Yale formulated a plan to unify nursing education in New Haven in a university professional school. The Rockefeller Foundation offered a grant of $150,000 to establish an experimental five-year university program. In his April 1923 letter below, Yale president James Rowland Angell formally offered the position of dean of the new School of Nursing to Annie Goodrich. Responding to Angell’s request for a list of her previous positions to present to the Corporation, she wrote that it was enclosed and added: “Perhaps you would like to know that the War Department recently awarded me the Distinguished Service Medal as organizer and first dean of the Army School of Nursing.”

Goodrich served as Chief Inspecting Nurse of the Army Nurses Corps during World War I. After inspecting 136 military installations, she drew up a plan for an Army School of Nursing. Thousands applied, and 500 students graduated in 1921, the largest class of nurses in any school up to that time.

Letter from President Angell to Goodrich, offering her the School of Nursing deanship position, 1923

In her eleven years of service to Yale, Dean Goodrich faced many challenges. She was a woman of strong convictions who wanted the best for her students. President Angell said of her that “whatever property of the University she had felt necessary to the successful furtherance of the objectives of the School of Nursing, she requested and usually achieved.” Goodrich’s mission was accomplished in 1934, her retirement year, when the entrance requirements were raised to a bachelor's degree. The first Master’s of Nursing degree was conferred in 1937.

In the photograph on the left, the first three deans of the School of Nursing gathered at the June 1944 commencement ceremonies (left to right): Elizabeth Bixler Torrey, served 1944–1959; Euphemia (Effie) J. Taylor, served 1934–1944; and Annie Goodrich, served 1923–1934.

Florence Wald, dean from 1959 to 1967, known as “the mother of the American hospice movement,” led the founding of Connecticut Hospice, the first hospice program in the United States.

Florence S. Wald (1917-2008), circa 1960s