PARA PAR@ ` TEXT ` Richards, Linda1841╨1930nurse and educatorBorn on July 27, 1841, in Potsdam, New York, Melinda Ann Judson Richards grew up from the age of four in Derby and Lyndon, Vermont. She attended schools in Lyndon and an academy in nearby Barton. She worked in the Union Straw Works in Foxboro, Massachusetts, for seven years until, in 1870, she attempted to fulfill a long-standing ambition by becoming an assistant nurse at the Boston City Hospital. Instead of the training she had hoped for, however, she found only menial work among equally ill trained colleagues, and she soon left. In 1872 she enrolled in the newly opened nurses╒ training school at the New England Hospital for Women and Children, and in 1873 she received the first diploma awarded by the nation╒s first school of nursing. After a year as night superintendent at the Bellevue Hospital Training School in New York City she returned to Boston to become superintendent of the Boston Training School (later the School of Nursing of Massachusetts General Hospital), which was then a year old and still insecurely established. In three years she developed a curriculum of classroom work for trainees, succeeded in winning admission of students to all wards of the hospital, and won recognition of the superintendent of the school as superintendent of nurses for the hospital as well. In 1877 Richards visited nurses╒ training schools at St. Thomas╒s Hospital, London, where Florence Nightingale had pioneered in the field, and at the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary, and she discussed the subject with Nightingale personally. She then returned to Boston and helped establish a training school at Boston City Hospital that was fully integrated with the organization and ward work of the hospital; she became matron of the hospital and superintendent of the school on its opening in 1878. She remained there until 1885, taking a lengthy leave of absence during that time owing to illness. In 1885 she volunteered her services to the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, under whose auspices she arrived in Japan early in 1886. Later that year she opened Japan╒s first training school for nurses at Doshisha Hospital in Kyoto. She supervised the school for five years. Ill health forced Richards to return to the United States early in 1891. Over the next 20 years, as her health permitted, she served as head of the Philadelphia Visiting Nurses Society in 1891; founded a training school at the Methodist Episcopal Hospital in Philadelphia in 1892; and headed the training schools at the New England Hospital for Women and Children in 1893╨1894, the Brooklyn Homeopathic Hospital in 1894╨1895, the Hartford Hospital in 1895╨1897, and the University of Pennsylvania Hospital in Philadelphia in 1897╨1899. In 1894 she was elected first president of the American Society of Superintendents of Training Schools. During 1899╨1904 she directed the training school at the Taunton Insane Hospital in Massachusetts, and in 1904 she established a school at the Worcester Hospital for the Insane, where she remained until 1905. In 1906╨1909 she headed the school of the Michigan Insane Asylum in Kalamazoo, and after another year in Taunton she retired in 1911. In that year she published Reminiscences of Linda Richards. She died in Boston on April 16, 1930. ╓styl `
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