The four training schools for nursing in Utah were all hospital based as was the norm in the U.S. in the late 1800s and on into early 1900s.

St. Mark’s and Holy Cross Hospitals

The Episcopal Church opened St. Mark’s Hospital in 1872 and struggling with a shortage of nurses opened a nurse training school in 1893. (With the migration of training from hospitals to colleges, the school would later become St. Marks-Westminster College School of Nursing and Health Sciences in 1948.) The Sisters of the Holy Cross opened Holy Cross Hospital in 1875, the second hospital in Utah, and their training school for nurses in 1901. Nurse training remained part of Holy Cross Hospital for over 70 years. (The final class of nurses to be trained at the Holy Cross Training School for Nurses graduated in 1973.)

Deseret Hospital and W.H. Grover LDS Hospital

Deseret Hospital, the third hospital to open in Utah, began under the auspices of the Relief Society, the women’s auxiliary of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Deseret Hospital had no nurse training program, and its tenure of operation was relatively brief: it opened in 1882 but struggled financially and closed in 1896. Nine years later, in 1905, W.H. Grover LDS Hospital opened with an accompanying School of Nursing. The hospital discontinued nursing education in 1955, with some of its faculty joining with Brigham Young University College of Nursing in Provo, Utah, and others joining the faculty at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. (Embry 2008, 282-283).

The County Infirmary Hospital

The fourth and the only hospital not church associated in the Salt Lake Valley was the County Hospital. At the time it opened in 1885 it was referred to as an “infirmary and asylum,” an early designation for a combined clinic and small hospital. Over 25 years later, the County constructed a new, larger medical facility. Salt Lake’s “County Infirmary Hospital,” as it was officially named, opened in 1912 to serve the “public at large,” as well as offering charitable medical care for “the poor” in Utah. (The indigent had previously been sent to St. Mark’s Hospital, “under an agreement with the County.”) The hospital’s first School of Nursing followed in 1913. (Of historical interest, in 1917 a separate facility, referred to as an “isolation hospital,” was constructed on the property for tuberculosis patients.) In 1923, the County built another medical facility on the property to house long-term care patients. It was named the “County Infirmary,” and the old building became the “County General Hospital,” a medical center that was “devoted strictly to ‘medical, surgical and obstetrical cases’ [and] also served the mentally ill.” Besides training nurses, the County Hospital would also be used for University of Utah medical students in training from 1945 until 1965 when the newly opened University Hospital Medical Center would serve that purpose. (Salt Lake County Hospital History, compiled by Jeff Hatch and Larry Decker.)

By 1913, then, four Nurse Training Schools were operating in Salt Lake City, all associated with hospitals. The University of Utah’s School of Medicine, which opened in 1905, aided in educating these nurses. In fact, according to the “History of Nursing Education at the University of Utah,” the dean of the University’s medical school taught anatomy and physiology to “one or more of the Salt Lake Schools of Nursing” (University of Utah Eccles Library Archives). This is the first documented link between the University of Utah and the nurse training schools in Salt Lake City. Furthermore, as the University of Utah College of Nursing website attests, “the first University of Utah nursing diplomas were offered in 1916 to a class of six students trained at the Salt Lake County General Hospital” (https://nursing.utah.edu/our-history ). (These nursing diplomas were awarded by the University to graduates of the County General Hospital’s nurse training school. At that time no courses were taken on campus as they would be when the University’s Department of Nursing was established in 1942.)