Florence Guinness Blake founded pediatric nursing as an advanced specialty with its own graduate education. She is also a large part of the reason a parent can sit with a sick child in an American hospital.
Florence Guinness Blake (1907–1983)
Chicago
Blake was born on November 30, 1907 in Stevens Point, Wisconsin. In 1928 she graduated from the Michael Reese Hospital School of Nursing in Chicago, Illinois. The faculty spotted her ability to teach almost immediately, and she began taking classes at the school while supervising at Sarah Morris Children's Hospital.
In 1932 she enrolled at Teachers College, Columbia University, finishing a bachelor's degree in 1936. A Rockefeller Foundation grant then sent her to teach pediatric nursing at the Nursing School of Peking Union Medical College in China, where she spent three years. Back in the United States she studied at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and at the Merrill-Palmer School in Detroit, completed a master's degree in 1941, and taught at Michigan and at Yale.
The argument
Blake worked at a time when American hospitals kept parents out. Visiting hours for children were short or nonexistent, on the reasoning that visits upset the child and disrupted the ward. Blake's position, developed from watching children on the ward and informed by the child development research she had gone to Michigan and Merrill-Palmer to study, was that separating a sick child from their parents was itself a harm, and that a pediatric nurse's job included the parents.
She set it out in The Child, His Parents and the Nurse, published by J.B. Lippincott in 1954. Reviewing it in the Yale Journal of Biology and Medicine that April, Morris Green predicted it would "make a real contribution to nursing education and child care in this country." It did. She also co-wrote and later took over as senior author of Essentials of Pediatrics, the standard nursing school textbook of the period, expanding its treatment of child development with each edition. Both books were translated and used abroad.
The programs
In 1946 the University of Chicago invited her to build an advanced pediatric nursing program — graduate-level preparation in a clinical specialty, which barely existed in nursing at the time. She ran it until the university closed its nursing school in 1959.
In 1963 she went to the University of Wisconsin in Madison as professor of nursing and director of the graduate program in pediatric nursing, where she stayed until retiring in 1970 as professor emerita.
She lived in Madison until her death on September 12, 1983. She was inducted into the American Nurses Association Hall of Fame in 1996.
Related
Sources
- Florence G. Blake, 1907–1983. American Association for the History of Nursing. Accessed September 9, 2026.
- ANA Hall of Fame inductees, 1996–1998. American Nurses Association. Accessed September 9, 2026.
- Review of The Child, His Parents and the Nurse, Morris Green. Yale Journal of Biology and Medicine, April 1954. Accessed September 9, 2026.
- Living the Legacy: Using the Vision of Florence Blake to Guide Pediatric Nursing Practice Today. University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health. Accessed September 9, 2026.
- Understanding and Supporting Families: The Legacy of Florence Blake. University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health. Accessed September 9, 2026.