Inaugural Issue
Spring 2003
Vol.1 | No. 1

Presidents Message

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Profile
Globe Trotting with Sunny Wijesinghe ’00

In Memoriam
Pioneer in Psychiatric Nursing, Gertrude A. Stokes, PhD.

Class Notes

News from the Johns Hopkins Nurses’ Alumni Association

In Memoriam

Pioneer in Psychiatric Nursing

The field of psychiatric nursing mourned the loss of one of its pioneers this year with the passing of SON alumna Gertrude A. Stokes, PhD.

Stokes held a BS from Hunter College and an MA from Teachers College at Columbia University before coming to the Johns Hopkins School of Nursing in the mid 1940s. She graduated with an RN from Johns Hopkins in 1947 and later earned a PhD from New York University.

Throughout her impressive career in psychiatric nursing, Gertrude Stokes taught and practiced at Bellevue Hospital, Strong Memorial Hospital, Wayne State University, the NYU School of Education, Maimonides Mental Health Clinic, the University of Illinois, and the University of Delaware.

While serving as director of nursing at Maimonides Mental Health Clinic in Brooklyn, New York in the 1960s, Stokes worked on a project funded by the National Institutes of Mental Health called “The Psychiatric Nurse in Community Psychiatry.” She wrote about this 41/2-year project in the very first book on community-based psychiatric nursing, The Roles of Psychiatric Nurses in Community Mental Health Practice: A Giant Step.

In a foreword to the book, Claire M. Fagin, PhD, then director of the graduate program in Psychiatric-Mental Health Nursing at New York University, wrote “the work of the Project staff can now be shared with psychiatric nurses and other workers involved in the broad spectrum of psychiatric and mental health services…. Such a book has been greatly needed.”

“ This was the beginning of the community mental health movement,” explains Fagin, now program director of the Building Academic Geriatric Nursing Capacity Initiative at the John A. Hartford Foundation and Leadership Professor Emeritus and Dean Emeritus of the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing. “New roles for nurses in this field were created. Hers was an original and lasting contribution.”

Fagin and Stokes met early in both women’s careers. “Gertrude was a major influence in my life,” Fagin says. “I knew her at Bellevue when she was a cadet nurse and I had no graduate education. She put theory to my intuition.”

Fagin remembers, “I wanted to be like Gertrude.”

Stokes left Maimonides to chair the department of psychiatric nursing at the University of Illinois, where she was promoted to a full professor in 1971. She then directed the graduate program at the University of Delaware College of Nursing before retiring in 1983.

In her retirement, Stokes became the full-time proprietor of the Veronica James Antique Shop. She passed away at age 85 on January 10, 2003 after a bout of pneumonia. She never married and is survived by two sisters, seven nieces and nephews, and 14 grandnieces and grandnephews.

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