Celebrating 50 Years: Museum of Nursing History Philadelphia
Zane Wolf, PhD, RN, CNE, ANEF, FAAN
Director at Large, Museum of Nursing History
The Museum of Nursing History is a Philadelphia treasure. As Philadelphians celebrate the 250th Anniversary of the City of Philadelphia, it is also time to celebrate the unique contributions of the 50 years of the History of Nursing Museum, located at La Salle University’s St. Benilde Tower, along with the city’s outstanding events throughout 2026.
Museum’s Evolution
The seminal idea of a nursing history museum in Philadelphia began in 1974 during a Day to Celebrate Nurses at the City’s historic Mütter Museum. As a result, the History of Nursing Museum was founded and located there in 1976 as a Bicentennial Project supported by funds and artifacts donated by nurses and friends of nurses. Led by a Board of Directors, the Museum continues to live it’s mission to preserve the history, exhibit nursing memorabilia, and educate the global nursing community and the public about the nursing profession’s past.
Acquisitions at the Mütter Museum grew and space was limited. Robert Cathcart of Pennsylvania Hospital provided space in the historic Pine Building, East Wing. Southeastern Pennsylvania League for Nursing supported the museum’s fiscal health until 1985 when it was incorporated as the Museum of Nursing History, Inc., a non-profit status organization. The Board accepted an invitation from Friend’s Hospital, moving the museum in 2005 to the historic Scattergood Building. Nurses and their families continued to donate artifacts and memorabilia. Next, in 2013, La Salle Univeresity welcomed the Museum of Nursing History to space in St. Benilde Tower, formerly Germantown Dispensary and Hospital, La Salle’s West Wing of the Tower. The moseum connects to kindred organizations. For example, Villanova University’s Falvey Library houses a complimentary digital collection of historic documents. The Navy Nurse Corps Association also provides a link to their digital collection and the Museum of Nursing History has a Navy Nurse collection.
Collections & Displays
The museum’s collection honors nursing’s current and future legacy. Many donated items, such as nursing pins, caps, uniforms, capes, photos, medical equipment, and books had been kept by nurses and their families in personal collections.
Nursing Pins
The museum’s extensive collection of nursing pins symbolizes nursing programs. Pins signal both program completion by students and eligibility to sit for the RN licensing exam. Each school of nursing’s pin is distinctive and frequently presented to graduates at pinning ceremonies. RNs often wear their pins as they practice nursing.
Contemporary pins were likely based on the Nightingale School of Nursing at St. Thomas’s Hospital in London that designed and awarded a badge with a Maltese Cross to nurses at the completion of their training program. The badge was a precursor of pins for nurse training programs throughout the globe. In the United States, the first pin presented to a graduating class was occurred at Bellvue Hospital in New York City, 1880.
Nurse’s Cap Collection
Like nursing pins, nurse’s caps distinguish graduates of schools of nursing. Nurse’s caps originated in the early Christian Era as a head covering for deaconesses caring for the sick. Florence Nightingale instituted the more familiar white cap. Around 1874, the Bellvue Training School in NYC adopted a special nursing cap to identify nurses who had graduated fro Bellvue. Other nursing schools developed unique caps as a way to identify the graduate nurse and school of nursing. The museum has an excellent collection of nurse’s caps, student and graduate uniforms and nurses’ capes.
Historical Value
Although many committed individuals have cared for ill people over the centuries, the significance of nurse training programs changed that dynamic and led to the development of the unique disciplinary knowledge and clinical competencies of the nursing profession. Today, many caps have disappeard from clinical practice; however, nurses who wore them still cherish and are proud of them. Pins, too, are worn less often in clinical settings due to the proliferation of scrubs. Despite the replacement of these professional identy symbols by identity tags with the RN notation, both are some of the historically relevant artifacts for the nursing profession. They symbolize a proud, people-oriented, diverse, caring healthcare role that rests on and values it’s caregiving history. Some of it’s nursing history is tangible in the collections of artifacts and memorabilia of the History of Nursing Museum, Inc. at La Salle University. The museum continues it’s determination to precerve nursing’s past while recognizing its historical links to the competencies of professional nurses, such as adherence to professional standards, excellent care, research, leadership, collaboration, health policy, and health management.
