Mission Health remembers a nurse’s legacy

From Mission Health:

Remembering a Mission Belle’s Legacy

By Robert Poarch

As we celebrate National Nurses Week at Mission, a recent donation to the hospital from Norma Spencer reminds us of how much nursing has changed over the years. Norma’s gift was a blue Mission Belle cape and white hat worn by her mother, Dorothy Butler, in the late 1940s.

Dorothy was so tiny when she was born in 1927 in Gatlinburg, Tenn., she could fit inside of a shoebox. Though Dorothy was always small in stature, she would leave a large legacy at Mission Hospital.

Dorothy came to Asheville in 1946 as a Mission Belle through a government program to train nurses for the Army. From 1893 to 1971, Mission Hospital operated a hospital-based nursing school that would eventually become the Memorial Mission Hospital School of Nursing. Unlike today, the Mission Belles, as they were called, trained together for three years, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Not only did the nurses receive exceptional training, they shared a sense of community and formed fond memories.

After graduation in 1949, Dorothy continued her training (pediatrics and neonatal) in Washington, D.C., and New Jersey. The Mission Belle returned to Asheville in the 1950s, where she would marry and work at Mission Hospital until she retired in the early 1980s. Dorothy passed away in 2013.

“If you were born in Asheville between 1950 and 1980, my mother probably saw you naked,” Norma said, and laughed, when asked about her mother’s legacy at Mission Hospital. “Thousands of babies went through her nursery. She loved the babies.”

There was no premature nursery at Mission before Dorothy. She set up the program and ran it as the head nurse for 16 years. “I can remember as a child momma going to Duke and Bowman Gray in Winston-Salem with babies because they didn’t have the specifications they needed here in town. She talked about leaving in an ambulance with two or three babies in a basinet,” Norma said.

Some of Norma’s other hospital remembrances from her mother’s time include playing on the grassy hills with her sister, Sue, listening to Johnny Moon strum his guitar and the smell of sterilizing the equipment. “I really remember the smell of the old hospital,” she said.

Starchy white uniforms and hats were replaced by colorful scrubs. Pre-sterilized equipment came along.

Norma, influenced by her mother of course, also became a nurse at Mission Hospital, where she was a caregiver for 30 years. The pair often drove together to and from the hospital for the few years they both worked there. Their paths rarely crossed during the day – mom cared for babies on one floor, while daughter was in adult care on another – but they remained connected by a mother’s “nurturing way.”