Frances U. Reiter and the Graduate School of Nursing at the New York Medical College, 1960-1973.

In 1960, at the age of fifty-six, Frances U. Reiter (Figure 1) became dean of the newly established Graduate School of Nursing, New York Medical College, Flower and Fifth Avenue Hospitals.1 For Reiter, this bold venture in professional nursing education marked the attainment of a dream. Here at last was a graduate school of nursing requiring the baccalaureate degree for admission, under the direction of a nurse, and focused on education for advanced clinical practice. This paper tells the story of Reiter, the Graduate School of Nursing at New York Medical College, the development of an educational program for advanced nurse-clinician practice, and the belief that personal care of the patient is the heart of nursing. New York Medical College Reiter came to New York Medical College at the invitation of Dr. Ralph E. Snyder, dean of the New York Medical College and President of the Flower and Fifth Avenue Hospitals Corporation.2 In its centennial year, the college was thriving. One of the few autonomous medical schools in the country, it had affiliations with municipal hospitals that provided care for over 2 million people annually. At a time when nearly all medical education was integrated into universities, it was preparing to go against the mainstream and establish an autonomous medical university center that focused on clinical roles, research and specialization in medicine, allied healthcare technicians, and, with Reiter's leadership, nursing.3 Most significantly for Reiter, New York Medical College had 3,500 beds for teaching, research, and patient care, and a philosophy that was a good fit with her thinking about professional nursing education.4 Both she and Snyder believed that graduate professional education differed from other types of graduate education in its combined service and academic orientation.5 They both believed that nurses, to be truly professional practitioners, required as broad an education as those entering other health professions, including the experience of delving deeply into the basic sciences and newly emergent knowledge so essential to contemporary health care. Finally, they both believed that the "early and continued sharing of class work by students of medicine and nursing nurtures mutual understanding of each other's roles and their interdependence, and is one basis for developing an order of communication that is professional."6 The Graduate School of Nursing would offer professional programs leading to the master's degree, hold to admission criteria consistent with diose of other professional programs, and provide a broad spectrum of educational offerings for those who give direct patient care.7 But Reiters dream went beyond educational structure: she planned to prepare a new kind of nurse-clinician: a "master practitioner, competent in care, knowledgeable about cure, perceptive about human motivation, and committed to ministration of the highest quality."8 Plans for the Graduate School of Nursing Reiters career, especially her faculty experience at Teachers College (TC), had prepared her well for this new venture. TC was a graduate school of education with a long history of preparing teachers and administrators. In 1945, the college initiated a series of five research studies funded by the W. K. Kellogg Foundation to develop appropriate teaching and learning experiences and as an overall study of the nursing curriculum. Reiter chaired the second of these studies, the Study of Advanced Clinical Nursing Education. Its goal was to develop plans, in collaboration with service institutions, to strengthen clinical nursing courses.9 Reiter visited ten universities and hospitals as part of this study, and found that too many advanced clinical courses did not offer much more than did standard basic nursing courses."1 In addition, the problems faced by short-staffed hospitals raised questions in her mind about ways to use professional nurses more efficiently." In 1948, under Reiters direction, artist Edith Kramer drew a series of soon to be famous cartoons illustrating the dilemmas faced by head nurses12 (Figures 2 and 3). …