?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 800 - $ 1,200
Stowers, Jessie A. (1865-1948) Small Archive of Ephemera and Material Documenting her Nursing Career.
Including: an album compiled during Stowers's time working as a nurse on Blackwell's Island [now called Roosevelt Island] circa 1894 containing approximately thirty-four black-and-white images taken at the nurses' residence, patient wards, showing patients in beds, one showing seven small babies in the same bed, group photos of nurses, an image of a classroom with a papier-mâché anatomical model, and a photograph of the nurses on a ferry in the East River, an early photograph of the old Gouvernour Hospital with the ambulance parked outside, and many others; two pairs of Stowers's eyeglasses; an album containing approximately eighty letters from her Gouverneur Hospital colleagues (mostly doctors) writing with donations for her retirement gift in 1921; a small group of ancestral family papers; Stowers's signed personal copy of the Hospital Formulary of the Department of Public Charities and Correction of the City of New York, New York: Printing Bureau, New York City Asylum for the Insane, Ward's Island, 1886, octavo, title stained, original paper wrappers (broken, chipped); a cabinet card of Stowers and her sisters in youth; two snapshots of Stowers holding a set of newborn triplets; a family wallet; a few other miscellany papers.
Stowers was born in Waddington, New York. She was an 1892 graduate of City Hospital, a nurse at Blackwell, and Superintendent of Gouveneur Hospital from 1895 until 1921. In the early photo of the original Gouverneur Hospital buildings its famous horse-drawn ambulance is standing in readiness. In 1902, Dr. Emily Dunning Barringer (1876-1961) became the first woman ambulance physician at Gouverneur Hospital, which served the lower east side of New York. Circa 1894, when Stowers was stationed on the so-called "Welfare Island" i.e., Roosevelt Island, in the East River, it housed a notorious complex of workhouses which included a large central hospital, as well as an almshouse, a smallpox hospital, and a hospital designated for patients deemed "incurable" by the system, which included those suffering from mental and physical disabilities. Investigative reporter Nellie Bly infiltrated the Women's Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell Island in 1887, and wrote Ten Days in a Madhouse, an exposé on the inhumane conditions she found there.
