School scrapbook and photo album of an African-American Nurse.
[Medical – Nursing] Redwine, Janie Beatrice. School Scrapbook and Photo Album of an African-American Nurse. Washington, D.C. 1932.
Oblong 4to.; green cloth.
A commercially printed “graduation book” that has been transformed into a makeshift yearbook for the Class of 1932 of the Freedmen's Hospital School for Nurses affiliated with Howard University in Washington, D.C. by graduate Janie Redwine.
The Georgia-born Redwine entered the school in 1929. She has used this book as a combination scrapbook and photo album, revolving largely around her years at the school, and particularly around the events surrounding her graduation. In addition to the calling cards of 25 of her classmates (from the total class of 31 students), she has also included numerous clippings, handwritten accounts of several balls, tea parties, and picnics given to the graduates, several pages of inscriptions from classmates, staff members, doctors, and nurses from the Hospital.
The book is illustrated throughout with 55 mostly sepia-toned gelatin silver snapshots of various sizes, mostly in the area of 4.5" x 3". The snaps show the nurse graduates in uniforms and capes, attending on the wards, and clowning around. Others show male doctors or attendants dressed in white.
Also included are programs for Commencement and other activities, graduation cards, lists of her classmates names and addresses, and even a section devoted to her favorite movies.
In her accounts of the various activities, it is clear that Redwine was ecstatic about becoming a nurse, and filled with enthusiasm for her future career. She makes clear in several places that June 3rd, 1932, the day after her graduation, is the most important day in her life. On that day she married Dr. Cleveland L. Jackson, a graduate of Howard University's School of Medicine in Leesburg, Virginia. Sadly she died in 1938 at the age of 29.
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