Nell Hodgson Woodruff School of Nursing

Our History
During the past century, the school has evolved from a small training school in a fifty-bed hospital to a school that now graduates more than two hundred baccalaureate, master, and doctoral students each year. Emory is ranked among the top ten private US schools of nursing, with the goal of becoming the best private nursing school in the nation.

The evolution of the School of Nursing since 1905 features seven moves, three new buildings, nine directors of nursing, nine deans (some interim), and four name changes. The school helped break the gender barrier by introducing more women to a traditionally male campus and the color barrier by graduating Emory’s first African American students.

When the school celebrated the groundbreaking of the Asbury Circle building (its second building and sixth home) in 1968, Dean Ada Fort reflected on the school’s first sixty years. The first twenty years marked the birth of the school on August 16, 1905, at the Wesley Memorial Hospital Training School for Nurses, located at the corner of Auburn Avenue and Courtland Street in Atlanta (now the site of the Auburn Avenue Research Library of African American Culture and History). The school was a part of the hospital, and both were housed in a renovated mansion known as the Calico House. Directed by Alberta Dozier, the nursing program comprised two years of practical training and some theoretical classroom instruction.

The second twenty-year period began in 1922 when the school and hospital moved to the Emory campus. In 1929, the school moved into its own building, the Florence Candler Harris Home for Nurses (now known as Harris Hall, a coed undergraduate residence hall). In 1932, the school experienced its first name change to Emory University Hospital School of Nursing.

The third twenty-year period that Fort referenced included the school’s third name change to Emory University School of Nursing, when the school separated from the hospital and became an independent school of the university, led by Dean Julia Miller, in 1944. During this period, the school established its baccalaureate and graduate programs, Fort began her twenty-five-year tenure as dean, and the Alpha Epsilon Chapter of Sigma Theta Tau International, the honorary society for nurses, was founded.

The school was just entering its fourth twenty-year period at the time of its 1968 building groundbreaking, shortly after the school was renamed for Nell Hodgson Woodruff, the wife of Coca-Cola magnate and Emory philanthropist Robert Woodruff. Although she left nursing school to marry Mr. Woodruff in 1912, Nell remained committed to nursing throughout her life, primarily through voluntary service to the American Red Cross and Emory. The school built the Asbury Circle building and with the move created a new BSN curriculum that focused on a specific nursing model to include basic nursing concepts and processes combined with clinical practice experience.