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A nursing pioneer's legacy

In her commencement address to the Marcella Niehoff School of Nursing Class of 2010, alumna Barbara Brodie—already regarded as a “living legend” within the nursing profession—delivered a simple but compelling message: Treat your patients with dignity, no matter their background.

“Dignity...signifies the human worth of an individual in the eyes of others and in their own estimation of who they are,” said Brodie, PhD, RN, FAAN, a 1957 graduate of Loyola’s Bachelor of Science in Nursing program. “Dignity is essential to our very being and enables us to face the world and maintain our place within it.”

That emphasis on the inherent worth of each person—instilled as Brodie cared for the poorest of Chicago’s poor during her clinicals—guided her throughout her career as a pioneer in the nurse practitioner movement, nurse practitioner education, and nursing history.

While Brodie spent decades at the University of Virginia, where she was founding director of the Eleanor Crowder Bjoring Center for Nursing Historical Inquiry, she maintained close ties to her alma mater until her death in February 2023.

She left a large gift to Loyola’s School of Nursing—one colleagues say reflects her commitment to teaching and mentoring the next generation, and to the school’s guiding principle of service to others.

“Barbara valued her undergraduate education at Loyola and always spoke enthusiastically about Loyola whenever she had the opportunity,” says Loyola Nursing Associate Professor Emerita Karen Egenes, EdD, RN. “She said it was important for undergraduates to absolutely love their school and stay attached to it, because it gave them their foundation in nursing.”

Brodie was a pioneer in the nurse practitioner movement, a mission inspired by her work with patients from under-resourced communities—particularly children—at the Cook County Hospital during her clinical experiences as a student and early career clinical practice.

“She was one of the first people who saw pediatric nurse practitioners as a way to bring health care access to lower-income groups that wouldn’t have had access to health care,” Egenes says.

But Brodie, who was named a “Living Legend” by the American Academy of Nursing in 2009 and received Loyola Nursing’s Damen Award in 2014 for leadership, is best known for her work in nursing history. She founded the American Association for the History of Nursing and urged schools to make the profession’s history a standard part of nursing school curricula.

“She said that the same issues in health care keep reemerging, and we have to learn from approaches used in the past if we want to move forward,” Egenes says. “She believed that the issues nurses identify and deal with over time are the ones that end up shaping health care policy.”