St. Bernard Hospital’s School of Nursing was founded in 1906 and helped to train many nurses who went on to work at Chicago hospitals, including St. Bernard Hospital. The nursing school was located at 6344 S. Harvard. In addition to the school, there was a nurse’s residence where nurses lived during their training. In 1909, the St. Bernard Hotel Dieu School of Nursing graduated its first class, including lay and sister nurses.
Affiliated with Loyola University Medical School since 1913, in the 1940s, St. Bernard and Loyola worked together to train nurses for the Nurses Cadets program, a program supervised by the United States Public Health Service (PHS) to train nurses during World War II. The School of Nursing closed its doors in 1974, but its impact and training of women in the healthcare field still endures today.
