In honor of the scary season, today's photo of the week features our popular Halloween friend. Here in Brooklyn Heights within the last few weeks we’ve seen skeletons clambering up or down the sides of buildings, leaning chattily over a table in quiet conversation, or clawing their way out of flowerpots. This individual seems to be a more benign instructional presence for this class of students, although the nearest nurse with a skull fragment on her desk seems a little awed.
The class is being taught at Prospect Heights Hospital, founded in 1871. According to the Brooklyn Daily Eagle (Prospect Heights Hospital marks 75th anniversary, BDE, 26 Feb 1946, p.4) it was the first hospital in NY State to institute a nursing school, the third to do so in the country, and one of the few hospitals in the country to have an all-woman board of managers.
The institution’s name changes give a good example of our evolving language around hospital care: founded in 1871 as Brooklyn Homeopathic Lying-In Asylum it became in turn, Brooklyn Maternity Hospital, Prospect Heights Hospital and Brooklyn Maternity, and later was shortened to Prospect Heights Hospital. It eventually merged with Long Island Hospital, and today the site is senior housing.
I also appreciate this photo as a good example of the retouching that was done to make the Eagle’s photos clear in print. The crisply outlined desks and chalkboard behind the class make them look like they are inhabiting a space that is half real and half imaginary, a fitting effect for this spooky time of year.
Interested in seeing more photos from CBH’s collections? Visit our online image gallery, which includes a selection of our images, or the digital collections portal at Brooklyn Public Library. We look forward to inviting you to CBH in the future to research in our entire collection of images, archives, maps, and special collections. In the meantime, please visit our resources page to search our collections. Questions? Our reference staff is available to help with your research! You can reach us at cbhreference@bklynlibrary.org.
This blog post reflects the opinions of the author and does not necessarily represent the views of Brooklyn Public Library.
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