South End resident, Dorothy Keeney, will talk with FOSEL’s Yvette Jarreau at South End Writes via ZOOM on Tuesday, October 6 at 7:00 PM, about the history of Boston public school nurses, The Untold Story of Annie McKay and the Boston Public School Nurses, 1905-1988 (details below). Herself a retired public-school nurse, Keeney spent many years researching the subject, and wrote about it for, among other outlets, the Boston Union Teacher; the South End Historical Society Newsletter; and professional nurses’ publications. Keeney became the unofficial historian for the Boston School Nurses and was the former historian for the Massachusetts School Nurse Organization.
The subject of Keeney’s book, Annie McKay, was appointed by the Boston School Committee in 1905 as the first public-school nurse in Boston and Massachusetts. She taught basic hygiene in, among other places, several South End schools, including the Quincy, Way Street and Andrews schools. After her first eight weeks on the job, McKay recorded 215 cases, made 576 home visits and helped more than 70 children obtain glasses. The experiment was considered such a success that the Boston School Committee hired 25 more nurses for Boston’s elementary schools and, within a short time, the state mandated school nurses throughout Massachusetts.
McKay was born in 1867 in Ontario, Canada, and began her career as a school teacher but switched to nursing. She attended, among other places, the Massachusetts Charitable Eye and Ear Infirmary. She lived in Boston and worked with the Red Cross in Europe during WW I. For a while she lived at 1525 Washington Street in the South End, where a plaque commemorates her legacy. She died in Ontario in 1944.
Keeney, a longtime Massachusetts resident who received a masters degree in Health Care Administrationj from Framington State University, described the nurses’ struggle for pay equity and a five-day work week, and their transformation to professional status from the stereotypical profile of a doctor’s handmaiden. Today, she says, school nurses are the clinical health experts in the school, the health care providers for students and staff during the school day, and advocates for preventive care and health maintenance.
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