The UTMB School of Nursing started with an idea by our own Nellie League, when she first proposed a nurse training program for the newly built John Sealy Hospital. Nellie worked tirelessly to bring the school to fruition, believing a hospital was incomplete without trained nurses. She and the other women she involved in this effort had first to convince city fathers and the medical profession of the need for such a school.
In 1890, according to the Galveston Daily News, Nellie raised the funds needed to hire Dorothea Frick, a graduate of Mount Sinai Hospital in New York, as superintendent. In addition to Nellie, Rebecca Sealy, widow of John Sealy, took a leadership role with 14 other Lady Managers who organized the school and maintained it by subscriptions and charitable entertainments such as teas, dances, concerts, musicals, and other “genteel” fundraising events that were expected of women then.
The two-year school officially opened on March 10, 1890, with 18 students. As the privately operated John Sealy Hospital Training School for Nurses, it was the first school of nursing in Texas, and the first west of the Mississippi. When the school came under the umbrella of the University of Texas in 1896, it became the first American nursing school directly affiliated with a state university.
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