Oral history interview with Margaret Landon, 1990 [text/print transcript]

              1
UNCG CENTENNIAL ORAL HISTORY PROJECT COLLECTION
INTERVIEWEE: Margaret Landon
INTERVIEWER: Linda Danford
DATE: September 17, 1990
[Begin Side A]
LD: Mrs. Landon, could you tell me when you came to UNCG [The University of North Carolina at Greensboro] and in what capacity?
ML: I arrived in Greensboro June of 1971 with an appointment to begin at UNCG School of Nursing in September of 1971. And I came in the capacity of an assistant professor of nursing for medical surgical nursing.
LD: And medical surgical were the classes that you taught exclusively?
ML: That was supposed to be what I was supposed to teach exclusively. Now medical surgical nursing is, of course, the bulk of nursing, of nursing content. There's so much of it that we can't even teach it—all of it; we have to pick and choose. But I ranged—I was there from '71 until I retired in '86, in 1986. And in that time I became a sort of jack of all trades. But perhaps if I describe the School of Nursing as it was when I arrived, then I could move through the changes.
LD: That would be very helpful.
ML: Or the improvements that occurred in the years that I was there and how the school grew.
LD: I would be interested in hearing that.
ML: What?
LD: I'd be interested to know that.
ML: Okay. The school had just graduated its second class. Dr. [Eloise] Lewis was the founding dean, and she came in 1966 with no faculty. There had been a two-year nursing program at the School of Nursing at UNCG. And she was to finish up that program and then to begin the baccalaureate in nursing—the four-year program. But she came along that first year—she had no faculty and she worked in the first office—the first space the School of Nursing occupied was in the basement of the infirmary on campus. I was not here at that time, of course, but then the next year she began to get a faculty, and they began to put a curriculum 2
together. And the first class graduated in 1970. And when I arrived in June of 1971, I arrived on graduation day, that Sunday. Catherine Turner [1942 Master of Science, nursing faculty] and I came to town the same time. And we had come from Vermont. And we had met Dr. Lewis years ago in the South and knew her as a professor when she was at [University of North Carolina at] Chapel Hill through the various nursing organizations that meet in the Southern Region Education Board. And when she called us in Vermont to ask us if we would like to join her faculty, it took us about two seconds to make up our minds. And we came.
LD: A great testimonial to her.
ML: Really and truly. The original faculty that she established or she drew were seven people. And some of them are still on faculty. Ernestine Small, Dr. Ernestine Small and Dr. Sandra “Micqui” Reed are still on faculty. And they were on the original faculty. Most of the rest of us have either retired or gone on to other places. But when I came—Catherine and I came—I think that we made twelve and thirteen on the faculty. And they had just graduated a class of eighteen. That fall we had a class of forty-seven juniors and thirty-five seniors, which was a substantial jump from the two preceding classes. And I began teaching in medical surgical nursing and was teaching with Mrs. Small and some of the others. And our teaching not only included classroom theory teaching, but also the nursing practicum courses in the hospitals themselves, areas of direct patient care.
And I believe that UNCG is still a university where they declare a major in your junior year; they haven't changed that. That was both a boom and a hindrance as far as the School of Nursing was concerned. It meant that our students came to us with all the prerequisites completed, but at the same time it meant that when the students came to us in the fall of the junior year with intent to major in nursing, they had really not set one foot inside of a hospital. Some of them had been candy stripers or nurses' aides and had some security. But for the majority of the students, they began their nursing career as a junior in college. And the year '71 went by, and we found that we were really spending so much of our time, almost up until Thanksgiving, just sort of pushing and prodding the students to go into patients’ rooms and to do the bare essentials of nursing care. And most of the students were—well some were very courageous. Others were more of the stand-back kind. I think that I had one student that I almost had to pry her off the wall sort of to get her to go into a patient’s room.
And so a discussion began, among the med surgical group particularly, that there needed to be some sort of introductory course, a basic introductory course to nursing. And three or four of us got together and asked permission of the dean to explore this. And when we had thought we had a good notion or idea of what it is was we wanted in this course and how it would benefit the students and the faculty and how it would facilitate the students' movement into the major, we went to the dean and then we went to the curriculum committee, across campus to the curriculum committee, and we established a sophomore course. And that meant that the students had a semester. It was taught both semesters, and that meant the students with the intent to major in nursing took it either in the fall or spring semester. And we also had a short clinical portion where they went into a hospital or a nursing home or something to at least find out if nursing was really want they wanted. You could see that it became a course where it helped the student to make up his or her mind, if 3
nursing was really what they wanted. And some of them changed their majors because they found out that that wasn’t what nursing was. They had some idealistic idea of what nursing was from either TV [television] shows or romantic movies or this sort of thing and found out that in real life—.
LD: Cherry Ames, Student Nurse [27 mystery novels with hospital settings published between 1943 and 1968]?
ML: Right, right or these books. I grew up reading a variety of books out in the '40s. But so many of the students, they really needed to know what nursing was before they actually began to get into the major. So that course began with the—I think in the fall of '74. And we got the course all set up and everything, and when it came time to appoint the teacher or for someone to volunteer to do it, nobody really wanted to do it because—well, it was all well and good to have this course and everybody agreed that we needed it, but no one really wanted to step down into what was a sort of a fundamental—kind of fundamentals course. And so I saw this as an opportunity to explore the new approach to teaching that was coming about at that time was a conceptual approach, rather than just teach facts, and figures and body systems and this sort of thing. There was this whole notion was going through the nursing profession of: "Yes, this is what the doctor does. The doctor will care for the patient. The doctor is there to either perform surgery or to prescribe a form of care for the patient." But he's there maybe ten minutes during morning rounds. The rest of the day is up to the nurse. And so what is it that the nurse does? She does a lot more than carry out the doctor's orders. Otherwise what is it that you describe as nursing care as opposed to medical care? So this gave me sort of a soapbox, and I was given permission to develop the course in whichever way I wanted, which is what all teachers want. Everybody wants to be in charge of a course that you can say, "Ah-ha, I can put my own ideas to work."
LD: [unclear] volunteering?
ML: Of course. And nurses, being women for the most part, we do not know how to say no. And that was always one of my big problems. But I was always interested, and I was always thrilled to get into something new. So this began, and I kept saying to myself, "Ah-ha, you know, here's my chance to put this not only before the students, but before the faculty to see if I can make converts to some of the faculty who had been teaching in sort of a medical model—teaching the disease, teaching the pathology, teaching what the doctor orders, and what medicines and this sort of thing. But getting down to what does the nurse—what is nursing care? Well, I really had fun with that course. So I not only taught juniors medical surgical nursing in the classroom and in the clinical area, but now I had this freshman—this sophomore course that I could play around with. And it met once a week for two hours, and then it had a clinical portion. You went either Tuesday or Thursday mornings to a clinical agency, and that really was a fun course. And I taught it for many years. Then we began to teach it in the summer as well because we had so many transfer students. Our classes began to grow. The class of '74 we graduated some forty-some students. The class of '75 we graduated seventy-some students. And the class of '76 we were graduating over a hundred students.
So you see looking back, as the numbers of the students increased, that that 4
sophomore course facilitated everyone because the students came to the faculty prepared to do some of the basic nursing activities. I lived in fear and trembling that first year after I taught the sophomores and then they came into the majors juniors, and I remember the first week of clinical, and I took my group to the hospital and lo and behold they could take blood pressures, and they could take temperatures, and they could go into a patient’s room and talk to the patient. And they could give a bath, they could make a bed and get a patient out of bed, and it was a total change from these little frightened people who had never been inside a hospital before. And so I sat in my office that first week, knowing that in my own clinical group it had made a big difference, but I kept waiting for the reaction of the faculty. And I had an office on the first floor, and I would wait for the faculty to come in, the med- surg faculty particularly because we still had med-surg first, the first class in the fall semester. And lo and behold, the faculty landed in my office, just saying, "My gosh. I can't believe it. The students are prepared to do this and do that." And, "What a remarkable change this course has made."
So anyway that was the first edition to what I taught at UNCG. And then in 1976 there was some administrative changes made and some structural changes made in the way in which the School was governed. And we were also beginning the process of developing a master's program in nursing. And so Catherine Turner became the assistant dean for administration. I was named the director of baccalaureate program, and Mrs. Marge Klemer was named director of the master’s program of nursing. So Dr. Lewis then had three people to help her with the administration of the School of Nursing. And, of course, by that time we had well over two hundred and fifty students from sophomore through senior. And the faculty kept growing by leaps and bounds. I think when I first took over the baccalaureate program, we had nearly thirty faculty by that time, and at the peak of the program we had thirty-seven, and I was responsible for thirty-seven faculty.
LD: When was the building built?
ML: The building was built—it was here when I came. I can't give you the exact dates on that, but I believe that by the time the first class graduated—. Now this will have to be checked out by Dr. Lewis because she has all of those dates. Margaret Moore [Class of 1935] was on faculty at that time, and Margaret was the great builder. Margaret knew all the workmen, and she knew plans, and she designed the building really. And that's why it’s named the Margaret C. Moore Building. I believe that by the time the first class graduated they were in that building, if not earlier than that.
LD: Was the university committed to the program?
ML: Yes. The university really was committed to the program. Of course during the '70s we had—there was a lot of federal trainingship money available, especially for the baccalaureate program and at the graduate level. So that when we started the graduate program—I think it had its first graduates in '77 or began teaching in '77, but again that's a point of detail that I'm not really sure of. And then as director of the baccalaureate program, I did not take an administrative appointment. I chose to remain faculty, which left me my summers. And I stayed a full-time faculty member, so that the one thing that I did give up was my clinical teaching in the hospital. I did retain my classroom teaching, my theory 5
teaching, as well as the administrative portion of the program itself. And I was the curriculum chairman. We went through a curriculum revision. And that took a couple of years to get that straightened out because we have an accrediting body whose criteria we must meet, and we must be accredited by the National League for Nursing in order to maintain our reputation. And the first accreditation took place before I got here in '71, and we were accredited for eight years, the full eight years, which is the maximum accreditation. And the second accreditation was in '78, and we received another eight years. And the third accreditation visit, reaccreditation visit, was due in '86, and I was retired by that time. I had open heart surgery, and the doctors just said "No. No more."
But along that time, not only had I taught, I had given up the fundamentals after about five years and moved—and I really missed that because I got to know the students—the sophomores—taught them as juniors, learned their names, and that used to jerk them up every once in a while because I'd call them by name if I'd meet them in the hall, or they'd raise their hand in class, and I would say "Yes, so and so." And then they'd come along, one of the students would say, "How did you know my name?" And I'd say, "Well, how many times have I taught you?" And then I began to teach in the senior year as well, the nursing leadership and the research portion of the curriculum. So I've taught—for some years I've taught students for sophomore, junior and senior level.
LD: That's an opportunity that you don't often get?
ML: No it isn't. And it’s really fun because the growth and development that a teacher can see in a group of students or individual students, seeing them as young, wide-eyed, idealistic, and hoping that they maintain that idealism, but they become more knowledgeable, more secure, more proficient. I can remember so many of our students that were really such excellent students, not just in theory and the classroom, but in the hospital. And our students were recognized. The patients liked to have our students take care of them. They didn't have that feeling that, "Is she going to make some kind of mistake?" And that was one nice thing about the faculty relationships with students is they, the faculty, usually had a group of eight, ten at the most in later years, so that one faculty member with eight students, the students get a good deal of supervision.
LD: Can you give me some idea—besides the hospitals in Greensboro, what other kinds of health care, institutions, did the girls experience?
ML: We taught—the students have to learn medical surgical nursing and they have to learn maternal child nursing, which is maternity and pediatrics. And we always had a very strong belief in the fact that we are teaching the students to become a part of the community. Not just that we're teaching students to work in hospitals, but to go wherever nurses are needed. [clears throat] Nursing is performed wherever the care is needed, wherever the client is. And we had a strong community component all the way through our program, which culminated in a community health experience itself in the senior year. We had a psychiatric nursing component in the senior year, which meant that the students had to go to mental health centers, day care centers. Early on we went to psychiatric hospitals, but as they became less and less the place for the mentally ill, we went wherever the mentally ill were—if it meant going to the homes, if it meant going to day care or to mental health 6
centers. Students went to doctors' offices, pediatric clinics, and the health department— through any kind of clinic that we could get our hands on.
LD: And you mentioned nursing homes?
ML: Nursing homes, yes.
LD: We had a student, I guess it was when my first son was born, who was assigned to us from UNCG, and she did some of—I've forgotten now what all she did, but she had to make some contact with the family and she had to do some follow up.
ML: Follow up. She probably met with you early in your pregnancy or—
LD: I think it must have been while I was pregnant.
ML: While you were pregnant? You see there's antepartum care, antenatal care, the natal care itself during the birth of the child, and then there's postpartal—postnatal care—and we believe that the student needed to see the mother and the father prior to the infant's birth, follow the growth and development of that fetus, participate with the family, if possible. I don't know if the student that you worked with had that opportunity to be with you.
LD: I think she must have come—she must have, now that you mentioned that.
ML: Did you have her phone number and name?
LD: Yes. No, I think she was there when Tim was born.
ML: That was part of our whole—the whole approach.
LD: I had forgotten that. But now that you've mentioned it, she was there. And then I remember that she made numerous visits. Of course, we live right across Aycock [Street] from UNCG.
ML: Sure. But we have our students usually carried a family like that. That was part of the new curriculum, and the students really enjoyed that. And they kept a daily log or a log of each visit. And saw the—and went to the hospital at the time of delivery, no matter, if they could get there if it was in the middle of the night.
LD: I had all of my babies during the day. I was very accommodating.
ML: Right. [laughs] And we had worked out an agreement that whatever that student happened to be doing that day, if the student got a call from the mother that the mother was in labor, the student could be excused and go if she wasn't at [Moses H.] Cone [Memorial Hospital, Greensboro, North Carolina]. For instance, if the student was at Wesley Long [Hospital, Greensboro, North Carolina] and the mother was at Cone, the student was excused to go to Cone or vice versa. And then the student followed the baby, the newborn, and the mother for several weeks and that went throughout the semester. And that gave the student a better 7
grasp of the whole process. At least that's what we believed in our approach to it. Instead of working in the nursery or just working in labor and delivery or just working on a postpartum unit, that student was able to see the whole picture by working with the pregnant family, as we called them.
LD: I was impressed with her as a student, and I was impressed with the idea.
ML: What year was this?
LD: This was '79.
ML: Yes.
LD: That's when I had my first child.
ML: And those were some of our big classes, our largest classes. We began with that class in '74 and '75, and by the late '70s and the early '80s we were graduating over a hundred students a year.
LD: Now has it decreased in size?
ML: Yes. I’ve not been there now for five years, but there has been a decrease all over the nation. It’s just isn't simply UNCG. And now you're seeing in newspapers nursing shortages once again. It seems that the human services careers took a dive in the early '80s, and the business, the computer, the MBAs, the you know—that began or became. The business degree became the thing that were of interest. As the yuppie culture grew, I think that the students began choosing different career options. And so the human services, especially the health services, lost out during that time. But classes—I don't have an accurate count, but I believe that this year's class is nearly a hundred, if it is not a hundred, this year's junior class at UNCG. I don't have any direct contact with the School anymore.
LD: What about specialization? I have the impression that nursing has gone in that direction.
ML: Specialization in nursing comes at the master’s level.
LD: How?
ML: The baccalaureate in nursing is to give a good foundation, to prepare the graduate to take the state board exam or the national state board now to be licensed. When the student graduates from UNCG with a baccalaureate in nursing, baccalaureate of science in nursing, but the individual must take the national exam in order to become licensed to practice nursing. That is the RN, registered nurse. And that's the basic of the foundation for nursing practice. Specialization begins at the master’s level. And of all the master's programs that there are, the graduate has a choice of becoming a teacher of nursing, an administrator in nursing, a family practitioner, a family nurse practitioner or a nurse practitioner in a variety of domains. And, of course, now in the late '70s, early '80s, the doctoral programs of nursing 8
began to develop. There were very few in the beginning. Now we have University of Alabama [Tuscaloosa, Alabama]; there's one at Chapel Hill; there's one at UVA [University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Virginia]; there's one in [University of] Richmond [Virginia]. I'm thinking of just the local—
LD: The regional?
ML: —regionals that now have doctorates in nursing science. And some of our faculty members enrolled in those programs. Others enrolled in PhD programs in administration, health administration or educational administration. Prior to that time, the doctorate that nurse educators held in the '50s and '60s and '70s was usually in sociology, psychology, physiology maybe, administration. It was an external doctorate, education not particularly related to nursing.
LD: Now Dr. Lewis was the dean of the nursing school the entire time that you were there?
ML: Yes. She came here in 1966 and retired in 1985. She was there nineteen years.
LD: Can you say something—I mean you have already paid her a compliment and spoken about how you came to accept the job at UNCG.
ML: Dr. Lewis is a very well-known figure in the nation in nursing. She has held many, many offices in national nursing organizations. There is one, The American Association of Colleges of Nursing, and that is made up of all the deans of the accredited colleges in nursing, and she was vice president; she was president; she was editor of their journal. She has been very active in the National League for Nursing, very active in the American Nurses Association. She was a charter member in the Academy of Nursing, which is by invitation only, a recognition. She received the O. Max Gardner Award [highest faculty award in the University of North Carolina System] here in the university system in North Carolina. She's held local office, national office, state office.
So working for Dr. Lewis was probably one of the most pleasurable parts of my entire forty-two years in nursing. I shouldn't say working for Dr. Lewis. We never worked for her. We worked with her; she worked with us. And it was a collegial kind of relationship. [pause] She was a very farsighted kind of individual. She could see—like in the '70s, she could see almost where nursing needed to be like ten years ahead. And she had worked with some deans older than herself, who had been in their time great leaders in nursing. And she’s like a sponge, you know. She picked up and learned from them and then developed her own style. She's a great lady. She's a Southerner, and she can be as down-home funny as ever you’d want anybody to be. And she can be as dignified and prissy as anybody would want to be. She's great fun to be with.
And it was just that the School of Nursing was a very happy place to work. Through her leadership we were recognized across campus as campus colleagues. And in many places nursing was sort of the newcomer in the university idea. And many of the ivory-towered professors of the University said, "We've got nurses on campus. What are nurses doing on campus? How did nursing ever get into the university thing?" And it was women like Dr. Lewis who broke down those barriers and helped the faculty to grow and develop 9
and helped the students become aware that there was a role that they needed to play, to make themselves visible on campus, not simply because they wore a different kind of uniform on campus than what the class may be in their uniform, but they were at first uphold the whole idea of nursing and to make it something that had credibility, that they were serious students. We had many of our students been in Golden Chain [honor society], many whom have been university marshals. Our students at the honor time—at the end of the year, there's always been a nursing student, to my knowledge anyway, among the honor recipients. Our students have graduated summa cum laude from the University, and we've had some, many magnas, many cum laudes. We have—in 1976 we established the chapter of the National Honor Society for Nursing, Sigma Theta Tau, on our campus, with seventy-six members. And that's the only honor society in nursing. That's the one that each college of nursing aspires to. Sigma Theta Tau. And it's an honor when one is received into Sigma Theta Tau. And that came—you see the school began in '70, and by '76 we already had a chapter here on the campus.
LD: How do you feel that the professional nursing has changed since the days that you started?
ML: [laughs] Oh my! Since I started?
LD: I know that it's changed in terms of the technology—
ML: Oh yes. The technology aside—
LD: —knowledge. I mean the role of the nurse.
ML: Oh, the role of the nurse. Oh yes. When I started, I went into nursing training during World War II [1939-1944 global war] in 1944. And I went to a hospital school of nursing, and we were there primarily for service. However, I went to the Mercy Sisters, Sisters of Mercy, for education in Detroit [Michigan], and they had a college just two miles down the road from the hospital, and so during our freshman year we were bussed down to the college daily for our freshman classes. Now that was a real break back in those days in 1944, a real break in tradition from how students were—we were trained in hospital programs. We began to get an education with the program that I went to. We actually went to college. We actually got bona fide college credits. We were taught by the regular college professors like the rest the college students at Mercy College. But then during our junior and senior year we were back on campus, living at the hospital and working eight-hour days or eight-hour evenings or eight-hour nights, giving direct patient care. And during the war, of course, there were so few nurses, and the students staffed the hospitals. And I look back now and I think, gracious at nineteen, a junior student, I was in charge of a sixty-bed unit with one other student helping me, eleven [pm] to seven [am]. And you would have those kinds of experiences for a month. And there were just the two of you and all of these patients. And we were responsible for the care of all these patients. And I used to tell our students, when I had eight of them, you know, in a hospital with me. Actually we had two instructors when I was in nursing training, and one was a surgical nursing instructor, and one was the medical nursing instructor. And those two instructors roamed that whole hospital. So you might not see that instructor for two or three days at a time. But we were really part of the hospital 10
staff. We were giving a service to the hospital. That's why it didn't cost as much.
LD: And how would you characterize the current situation?
ML: The students now are receiving a bona fide college education. They are granted a degree. We were not granted a degree; we were simply given a diploma. And when I went to college to get my baccalaureate of science, I couldn't go to—I wasn't near a college that had one in nursing, so I had to go straight through biology, a regular bachelor of science in biology. And I chose—English is my minor because chemistry just isn't my thing. And so some of my credits transferred, but very few of them. The college credits that I had taken that freshman year at Mercy College—the English, the biology, that sort of thing— transferred, but nothing else. So I actually had to start from scratch.
LD: Before we started the tape, you were telling me you often encouraged your students at UNCG to take general education.
ML: Oh, yes. I'm a firm believer that the broader the educational base, no matter what the major is, the broader the base, the more rounded the educational process is, the better it is for the student. That was the problem with the hospital schools—we were so narrowed down to just nursing, which in those days we really were simply following doctors' orders and making beds and giving baths and all of the traditional kinds of things that people associated with nurses. Nursing education today is as far from that as the early airplanes are from the jets [laughs] or from the automobile as from Henry Ford's Model T. So that I firmly believe that any student, regardless of the major, I don't care if its business, nursing, or whatever, should take a course in logic. How else does one learn to get from point A to point B to point C without getting lost? I believe students should have—all students need courses in ethics. And it doesn't need to have medical put before it, medical ethics. I think we've seen since, during the political appeals of the '70s and even the '80s, the ethics committees and the government. Ethics and business. Ethics is something that just doesn't belong in the medical field or in dealing with human lives, but ethics is how we live our lives. I think a classical education is very good for anyone. I think learning how ancient cultures lived—if we don't know where we came from, if we don't know ancient cultures and past history, and if we haven't been exposed to the development of man and civilization from the ancient times to where we are now, how can we really know our place here now? And how can we know where we're going in the future? I do not understand people who can be so narrowly educated as not to have had literature, not to have studied the literature, who cannot write well, who can't write more than declarative sentence and even then don't write the declarative sentences well, who cannot put together a paragraph logically. Again my point of logic from point A to B without getting lost or before they ever find C or never find C at all.
And that isn't a skill that should belong just to people who are majoring in English or journalism. Why shouldn't nurses write well? Because nursing research is becoming all more and more important. And in order to become a master's candidate, one must finish a thesis. One must do a dissertation if one is in a doctoral program. And if one can't write, and if the student, no matter what level of education, doesn't know how to go and use the library, then what has the basic education been all about? I think students—I taught grade 11
school for several years. I've had a wild and wooly career. I've worked hospitals. I've taught grade school. And I've taught nursing. I taught nursing for almost twenty-four years. And for two years, because I was finishing my degree, I taught two years of grade school because I had a degree in English. And I taught English. I had fifty students, seventh and eighth graders, and I taught English to one hundred and fifty eighth graders one year, and I went back to the old-timey way of teaching grammar. I had them diagramming sentences on the board, and it was great fun. I thoroughly enjoyed it. And that is where I found out that I really wanted to be a teacher. And I really wanted to teach nursing. I had already had fifteen years of working in hospitals, a variety of roles. And that was when I began to see if I could teach students my philosophy of nursing, then think how many more patients I would reach by teaching students than just working one-on-one with a patient myself. And I always used to try to instill in the students the need to see that patient, not simply as the person in that bed, but to see that person as a member of a family—a member of a community to which that patient will return, if he gets well. And that that patient is more than the reason for his hospitalization. And see, that’s where nursing care differs from medical care.
[End Side A—Begin Side B]
ML: If one can see the patient over and above the reason for the hospitalization—let me give you an example. Let's say that we have a young man of twenty-six years old or maybe an elderly gentleman of sixty or maybe a young woman of forty, and for whatever reason these three people are placed in a hospital, and they are put on bed rest. Now bed rest can become the most deadly thing in the world, mentally and physically and emotionally, because the patient becomes confined to the area of that bed. The bed might be six and some inches or six feet and some inches long and so many inches wide. And the bed might be in a room with another person, another bed, and so there might be a companion. Or the person might be in a private room. But anyway, sooner or later that person in that bed—the focus that that person gets is simply that bed, those four walls, the daily trips from the doctor, the visits from the doctor. And he or she begins to look at that door waiting for some—for a human being to come in through that door. They don't even mind if the person comes in with a hypodermic needle or a pill or whatever it is, as long as some human being comes in there.
So I used to say to the students, "This is nursing care." Because what happens to that person in the bed is that every body's system is affected, including the mind and the emotions because man's healthiest position is upright on his two feet and moving. A person on bed rest is in a prone or supine position. It's recumbent, whatever it is. The skeleton is not doing its primary purpose of weight bearing. The bones begin to soften. The muscles are not doing their primary purpose of movement, and so they become flaccid. The circulatory system depends on the muscular system to move the circulation, so that becomes slowed down. The digestive system and the urinary system depend on an upright moving body for proper elimination. You see the picture I'm drawing?
LD: It's so related.
ML: You can't say that this person has something wrong with his heart because if there's 12
something wrong with his heart, then there's something wrong with his lungs, his kidneys, his muscles, his skeletal system, his emotions. A person who has a heart attack is probably one of the most frightened people in the world. I've gone through open heart surgery. It's frightening. And with all my knowledge of what was going on, I don't know if it was more frightening or less frightening. But this is what I call nursing care. There is so more much more for the nurse to be aware of than just simply what the doctor has written that morning on the doctor's orders to give this medication, or allow this kind of diet, or provide this amount of exercise. That's a very small portion of what nursing is.
LD: Well I think UNCG lost a great deal when you retired. [laughs] I'm sorry that you're still not over there encouraging students to branch out and enter more into the university.
ML: There are so many students that I'll meet them in grocery stores, or I'll—I've been a patient at Cone, and it's marvelous to be a patient at Moses Cone or Wesley Long, and to have my own graduates take care of me. When I had my open heart surgery—I had it in December of '85, and the nurse who was my primary nurse was one of our graduates from May of '85, and it was wonderful for me to see that she was not intimidated by having me as a patient.
LD: A great many of UNCG—of Greensboro's nurses must be UNCG trained.
ML: I would say that probably three-quarters of Cone staff, or three-fourths, two-thirds Cone staff is. And a good deal of Wesley Long staff is. But they're all over. Now we have students in the military. One of our graduates from '74 called a classmate and said, "Wish me well. I'm on my way." He's a captain in the Air Force Reserve, and he just left for Charleston [South Carolina] for Saudi Arabia with a medical unit. We have had graduates in all branches of the military. And they do extremely well. We have graduates with their doctorates. We even have a couple of graduates who are physicians. We have a couple of graduates who are lawyers. It's fun to watch—to go back and to meet some of them and—or to get a letter. At Christmas time I always enjoy my mail because I hear from so many of them. And they tell me in great detail what they've been doing. And they remember certain things, like they'll say to me because I've had fifteen years of nursing practice. When I taught, I had real-life situations dealing with patients that I could put into the content wherever it fit. And so many of the students have said to me, "Mrs. Landon, don't ever lose those stories that you used to tell us about those patients that you cared for because that really made the content come to life." And I do miss—I do miss it. I do miss the time with my students.
LD: I can see that. I mean you always seemed to have a close and continuous contact with your students. It really sounds like a very rewarding career.
ML: It was. I had nearly sixteen years here, and it was great fun. And the faculty was so good to work with. And again I maintained the same kind of approach Dr. Lewis did. I worked with the faculty. I may have been the one that carried the title of director of the program, but—so what. That wasn't my major reason for being there. [laughs] It just meant that I was in charge of calling the meetings and getting everybody together and seeing that all of the work got spread out evenly and that we all did our share and we all did it well and the 13
students were learning, the teachers were teaching, and the curriculum was sound. And we worked together as a group to accomplish the best that we could. And I think our graduates were reflect that.
LD: I believe they do. I’ve had contact with many of them. Well, I thank you for allowing me to come and interview you this evening. And it’s been a pleasure for me.
[End of Interview]