Belle Herman Weiss, retired nurse and oldest-known alum of Mount Sinai Phillips School of Nursing (formerly Beth Israel School of Nursing)
At 106 years old, Belle Herman Weiss, RN, is thought to be the oldest living alum from the Beth Israel School of Nursing, now the Mount Sinai Phillips School of Nursing (founded in 1902), and one of the oldest living nurses in New York. Belle, who retired years ago and lives in Westchester County, fondly recalls her time in nursing school, which she began at just 16 years old—during a time when harmful diseases were widespread and difficult to treat.
“I enjoyed all the experiences I had to go through in nursing school,” says Belle, who graduated in 1936. “I loved being with a lot of other young women and having a goal to achieve.”
A good student who loved studying medicine, Belle was fascinated with figuring out patients’ diagnoses, which she compares to being a detective solving medical mysteries. “My favorite subjects were anatomy and physiology. I had a good memory and I was able to remember all the bones and their function. I enjoyed being able to recite the different parts of the body and what they did,” she says.
However, the lack of penicillin and treatments for infectious diseases in the 1930s and 1940s made nursing a challenging—and potentially dangerous—career path. She remembers contracting a skin lesion from tuberculosis at a hospital she worked in, noting she was “very lucky” it did not spread to her chest.
“It was a very difficult time, and [we were] studying at a bad time,” says Belle of being a nursing student. But she says many nurses managed to avoid infections by donning the cloth masks, rubber gloves, and gowns available at the time, and especially, routinely washing their hands. “Luckily, most of us stayed pretty healthy,” she says.
After graduating from the Beth Israel School of Nursing, Belle received a public health degree from New York University, which she says aided her when she later worked for The Willard Parker Hospital in Manhattan, where many patients had polio and were cared for in iron lungs (large horizontal machines that patients would lie in, which stimulated breathing). Medical technology in those days, she explains, was far more rudimentary and cumbersome to work with. For example, intravenous (IV) therapy—a routine therapy administered by nurses today using prepackaged components and fluids—was rarely ordered in the 1930s and 1940s. When it was, nurses had to prepare all the separate components—a glass bottle of saline, a separate rubber stopper and tubing, and a metal needle—and it was quite a process.
First you got the IV pole. Then you went into the utility room and you got a sterilized package that contained the container that you were going to put the saline in. Then you got the connection of tubing, and then you got the needle that went with it. Then you got the saline that you had to pour into it. You had to get this glass container connected to the rubber tubing and put a stopper on the tubing so it wouldn’t leak out. Then you filled the container with the saline from a big bottle and hung it on the pole. Then you let the air run out, and then you connected the needle. Before you called a physician to get them to put the IV in, you had to wrap two hot water bottles around the container to warm the fluid to room temperature. That’s how an IV was given.
She says hospitals also lacked antibiotics. In their absence, she says doctors would order “bodily irrigations”—treatments that involved washing out the nose, eyes, ears, throat, and other orifices, in the hope it would wash away disease.
“We used to have a saying, ‘If in doubt, wash it out,’” Belle says, adding that nurses also kept patients healthy by routinely bathing them “head to toe.”
After retiring from nursing at age 70, Belle worked in a doctor’s office as an administrator until she was 92. She put her nursing degree and training to good use over her long career—working at hospitals throughout New York City, Long Island, and Westchester County, as well as on an ambulance, where she helped transport patients with communicable diseases. She says she enjoyed taking care of people, and particularly loved her pediatric patients. One little girl who died from kidney disease stands out to her the most.
“I can still picture her sometimes, walking around her little crib, and reaching out her arms for me to pick her up,” she says. “Those memories stick with me.”
While Belle enjoyed a storied nursing career—in addition to getting married in 1943 and having three children, including a daughter who is an advanced practice nurse in Westchester County—the two-and-a-half years she spent training at the Beth Israel School of Nursing are still fresh in her memory. She remembers the intensive 12-hour work schedules, and still recalls the names of many fellow students and head nurses she trained with. The nursing program was very disciplined, she says, and helped her acquire valuable experience for her nursing career.
“I did get a very good training,” remembers Belle of the Beth Israel School of Nursing. “We treated the patients with elite nursing care.”