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A Piece of History

UVA President Teresa Sullivan recently gave her late mother’s nursing cape to the UVA School of Nursing’s Eleanor Crowder Bjoring Center for Nursing Historical Inquiry. The center, one of just a few such archives around the world, is the repository of thousands of personal effects, documents and other pieces of nursing memorabilia, as well as a growing digital archive of nurses’ stories. Sullivan’s mother, Mary Elizabeth Finnegan, enlisted in the Army Nurse Corps at age 25, shortly after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, and began a whirlwind of travel, service and nursing “under live fire” in the European theater in World War II.

President Teresa Sullivan and School of Nursing dean Dorrie Fontaine Sanjay Suchak

“My mother conveyed to me a vivid impression of the long-term impact of violent conflict and the need to care for those who had served our country,” Sullivan says.

For more on the Bjoring Center’s collections, see the Fall 2013 issue of Virginia Magazine.