Biography:

Jennie Mae Quinn

Jennie Mae Quinn was born in Milford, Pennsylvania, in 1880. She received her early education at Milford High School and at East Stroudsburg Normal School. Quinn completed her nursing training at the Lackawanna County Hospital (later a state hospital) in Scranton, Pennsylvania, on June 22, 1899. She was a private-duty nurse for about ten years after graduation. Quinn spent part of this time nursing victims of a typhoid-fever epidemic at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. There was also a period of about two years when she was supervisor of night nurses at the Franklin Hospital in western Pennsylvania and superintendent of nurses at a hospital in Georgia.

Quinn was recruited as superintendent of nurses of the Hattiesburg Hospital in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, through the New York Registry of Nurses. She arrived at the Hattiesburg Hospital in October of 1910 and was soon asked to direct the nursing school there. Quinn served as nursing-school director until April 4, 1917, when she married James A. Cameron of Hattiesburg. Cameron continued teaching in the nursing school and serving as a nurse anesthetist and x-ray technician from 1917 to 1925, when she resigned to spend more time with her family. She was also secretary of the nurse-enrollment committee of the Mississippi Red Cross during World War I.

 
Scope and Content:

This collection consists of two volumes of handwritten lecture notes that were taken while Jennie Mae Quinn Cameron was a nursing student at the Lackawanna County Hospital in Scranton, Pennsylvania, from 1897 to 1899. The collection also contains several untitled and undated speeches, which Cameron delivered during the latter part of her nursing career from 1954 to 1961. They cover different aspects of the nursing profession, and some concern the formative years of the Mississippi Nurses Association. Most of the speeches are handwritten. There are also Camerons membership certificates for various nursing associations from 1899 to 1932.

 
Series Identification:

Series 1: Speeches. 1954-1955; 1958; 1961; n.d. 26 items.

"Address to Practical Nurses Graduating Class"; "Development of Nursing in America"; "Discoveries on Road to Health"; "Early Days of Nursing in Hattiesburg, Miss."; "Ethics in Private Nursing"; "Florence Nightingale"; "Higher Standards for Training Schools"; "Mississippi’s Contribution to Medical Progress"; "Progress of Health in Mississippi"; "Woman’s Work"; and untitled.

Box 1

 

Series 2: Lecture Notes. 1897-1899. 2 volumes.

Jennie Mae Quinn Cameron’s lecture notes taken during nursing school at the Lackawanna County Hospital in Scranton, Pennsylvania.

Box 2

 

Series 3: Certificates. 1899; 1905-1908; 1910; 1914-1916; 1932. 13 items.

American Nurses’ Association; Graduate Nurses Association of the State of Pennsylvania; Mississippi State Association of Graduate Nurses; Mississippi State Board of Examiners; Nurses Examining Board; Pennsylvania State Board of Examiners for Registration of Nurses; and Scranton Training School for Nurses, Scranton, Pennsylvania.

Box 1 (1905-1908; 1910; 1915-1916; 1932; n.d.)

Box 3 (1899; 1910; 1914)