Florence Guinness Blake

Born there on November 30, 1907, she was the daughter of Baptist minister James Blake and musician Thelma Dunlap Blake, and the family steered her toward nursing. She earned her diploma at Michael Reese Hospital in Chicago in 1928, studied at Teachers College, Columbia, and spent roughly 1936 to 1939 teaching pediatric nursing at Union Medical College in Peiping on Rockefeller funding while war closed in. A master’s at Michigan followed. In 1946 she built the graduate program in advanced pediatric nursing at the University of Chicago around keeping parents in the room, not merely running procedures. The Child, His Parents and the Nurse (1954) was the first textbook to write that approach down as a field; a Yale reviewer called it patient-oriented care instead of disease-oriented care, which was the whole argument. She later co-authored, then served as senior author of, Essentials of Pediatric Nursing and Nursing Care of Children.

Wisconsin brought her back in 1963 to run the pediatric graduate program at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She retired in 1970 and stayed in Madison. The American Nurses Association inducted her into its Hall of Fame in 1996.

She died in 1983 and was buried at Forest Cemetery on Patch Street in Stevens Point, in the family plot, the stone marked Daughter. Birth certificate and grave are the same city: the childhood is the manse, and the science is what she built after she left.