Edsel O’Connor
Psychiatric Nurse
Edsel O’Connor was born in 1931 at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital in New York City. After she graduated high school in 1949, she worked initially as a babysitter for her piano teacher’s grandchildren and then as a seamstress. As “she wasn’t good at sewing,” she decided to pursue a role as a nurses’ aide at Goldwater Memorial Hospital on “Welfare Island,” aka Roosevelt Island. With the encouragement of a doctor where she worked, she started nursing school at Polyclinic Hospital (across from Madison Square Garden at the time) and ultimately enrolled in Creedmoor State Hospital School of Nursing. The school trained nursing students from 1937 until it closed in 1973, when college-based baccalaureate nursing programs replaced many hospital-based diploma programs. Edsel graduated “number one in her class” in 1959 and spent her career in psychiatric nursing.
Her first nursing job was at Creedmoor Psychiatric Center. Built in Queens, New York, in 1912, Creedmoor Psyhciatric Center housed nearly 7,000 patients and served as a Farm Colony of Brooklyn State Hospital. The patients supported the grounds and gardens and tended to the livestock. A Pulitzer Prize-winning book, The Patient, was published in 1982 and documented the lived experience of a schizophrenic patient there. Still, over the decades, the center frequently became part of front page news and became abandoned mainly during the de-institutional era for mental health. This year, in 2023, the parking lot was used as emergency relief migrant shelters for adult male asylum seekers, and the borough continues to seek sufficient use of the 55 acres of land and campuses.
When Edsel didn’t feel the patients were treated well at Creedmoor, she moved to a role in psychiatric nursing at Montefiore in the Bronx in 1969.
I learned a lot, but I didn’t like the way they treated the patients.
There, she focused on treating and caring for the patients as though they were family and later taught new nurses to do the same.
When I started teaching, one thing I taught, I tried to teach the students was to imagine that, this patient is a member of your family and treat everybody the same as though they were somebody you cared about.
She ended her career by working with the homeless population, for which her psychiatric background was a requirement for the position. Although she learned a lot, she found that “a lot was asked” of the nurses, such as covering shifts or working holidays without adequate pay. She stayed at Montefiore until she retired at the age of 66. Thanks to her daughter Regina, Edsel recorded her Nurses You Should Know video on June 4, 2023, at the age of 92.
Sources
The information above was sourced from Edsel O’Connor and her daughter, Regina O’Connor.
Edsel recorded her Nurses You Should Know video on June 4, 2023, at the age of 92!
Learn More
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Know Your History
- Nursing CLIO to engage with historians and scholars committed to deep work around historical accuracy in healthcare and nursing.
- American Association for the History of Nursing to attend monthly webinars on topics of nursing history, view the calendar here.
Examine Bias
- NurseManifest to attend live zoom sessions with fellow nurses on nursing’s overdue reckoning on racism or to sign their pledge.
- Breaking Bias in Healthcare, an online course created by scientist Anu Gupta, to learn how bias is related to our brain’s neurobiology and can be mitigated with mindfulness.
- Revolutionary Love Learning Hub provides free tools for learners and educators to use love as fuel towards ourselves, our opponents, and to others so that we can embody a world where we see no strangers.
Support & Advocate
- National Coalition for Ethnic Minority Nurse Association to stay engaged with topics relevant to nurses of color.
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