Guest Speaker

Andy Ziskind, MD
Former President, Barnes-Jewish Hospital

Honoree

Homer G. Phillips Nursing Association

The Homer G. Phillips Hospital opened in February 1937 as the successor to the St. Louis City Hospital No. 2 for Colored, which had opened in 1919. Until it was reclassified as a racially integrated institution in 1954, Homer G. Phillips Hospital was the world’s largest exclusively black municipally operated general hospital. The School of Nursing at City Hospital No. 2 was accredited in Missouri in 1920. The first graduates of the St. Louis City Hospital No. 2 School of Nursing were Miss Bessie Newsome, Miss Beatrice Wilkerson, Miss Agnes Smith, and Miss Beatrice Hinch, who were registered to practice nursing in 1922. Working closely with the City Department of Health and community health centers, Homer G. Phillips nurses were also highly trained public health nurses. City No. 2 nurses were at ground zero during the 1918 Flu Epidemic, and Homer G. Phillips nurses worked in the city’s venereal disease clinic and were actively involved in home child visits, community nutrition programs, and direct observed therapy for TB.

2006 Lecture Photo Gallery

Photo by Lois Ingrum – Artists Media Co-op