For many of the nurses these wages were insufficient, as many of them were struggling financially and giving back 25 % of their wages for financial assistance to the hospital. The nursing program allowed students to earn a weekly wage, ranging from 1 to 4 dollars, after their first two weeks of work. In addition, Mahoney worked for several months as a private-duty nurse. Outside of the lectures, students were taught bedside procedures, such as taking vital signs and bandaging. These lectures consisted of nursing in families, physiological subjects, food for the sick, surgical nursing, child-bed nursing, disinfectants, and general nursing. shift, which required Mahoney to attend lectures and lessons to educate herself through instruction of doctors in the ward. The intensive program consisted of long days with a 5:30 A.M. Mahoney's training required that she spend at least one year in the hospital's various wards to gain universal nursing knowledge. Mahoney worked nearly sixteen hours daily for the fifteen years that she worked as a hospital laborer. It is presumed that the administration accepted Mahoney, despite not meeting the age criteria, because of her connections to the hospital through prior work as a cook, maid, and washerwoman there when she was eighteen. Out of a class of forty, Mahoney and two white women were the only students to complete the program and receive their degree. The criteria the hospital used in the student selection process emphasized that the forty candidates would be "well and strong, between the ages of twenty-one and thirty-one, and have a good reputation as to character and disposition". Her sister, Ellen Mahoney, attended the same nursing program for a time but was unsuccessful in receiving her degree. Mahoney was admitted into a sixteen-month program at the New England Hospital for Women and Children (now the Dimock Community Health Center) in 1878 at the age of thirty-three, alongside thirty-nine other students. Nursing schools in the American South rejected applications from African American women, whereas further North, though the opportunity was still severely limited, there was greater chance at acceptance into training and graduate programs. Black women in the nineteenth century faced systemic barriers to formal training and career opportunities as licensed nurses. Mahoney knew from a young age that she wanted to be a nurse, possibly due to seeing immediate emergence of nurses during the American Civil War. She was inducted into the American Nurses Association Hall of Fame in 1976 and the National Women's Hall of Fame in 1993. Mahoney received several honors and awards for her work. An increase in the acceptance of Black women into notable medical positions, as well as the integration of the NACGN with the American Nurses Association, prompted the dissolution of the organization in 1951. The NACGN played a foundational role in eliminating racial discrimination in the registered nursing profession. Mahoney, Franklin, and Thoms worked to improve access to educational and nursing practices and to raise standards of living for African-American registered nurses. Thoms, two of Mahoney's colleagues, met in New York City to found the National Association of Colored Graduate Nurses (NACGN). In 1908, Martha Minerva Franklin and Adah B. In 1879, Mahoney was the first African American to graduate from an American school of nursing. Mary Eliza Mahoney (– January 4, 1926) was the first African-American to study and work as a professionally trained nurse in the United States. New England Hospital for Women and Childrenįirst African American woman to complete nurse's training in the U.S.
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