The Job by Ellen Ruppel Shell

Author:Ellen Ruppel Shell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2018-10-22T16:00:00+00:00

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Hyden burst briefly into the spotlight in the winter of 1970 when a coal dust explosion just four miles from town killed thirty-eight miners. Word got out that it was the worst mining disaster in forty-five years, and the story spread. The lone survivor, conveyor belt operator A. T. Collins, was blown sixty feet out of the mine and into the road. He spent two weeks in Hyden Hospital, soon to be the new home of the other thing Hyden is famous for: the Frontier Graduate School of Midwifery.

Midwifery plays a vital role in rural Kentucky, a region where physicians have never been plentiful. The Frontier school was founded in 1939 by the Frontier Nursing Service as part of a demonstration project focused on the care of mothers and children. FNS founder Mary Breckinridge, the mother of nurse-midwifery in the United States, located her operation in the eastern Kentucky mountains, “in the heart of a thousand-square-mile area covering parts of several counties, where some 15,000 people lived without benefit of one resident state-licensed physician.”

When FNS got its start in 1925, it secured staff in one of two ways: by sending American nurses to Great Britain for midwife training or by importing trained British nurse midwives to Kentucky. The midwives roamed the region on horseback, delivering babies and health care of almost every sort. But at the start of the Second World War, most of the British nurses felt the call to return home and it was no longer possible to send American nurses abroad for training. Rather than cut back on its services, FNS opened the school and enrolled its first class, training its own midwives, who now had the luxury of traveling the region by Jeep rather than horse. The school has been in operation ever since, training nurse midwives and nurses from every state and from around the world. Considered one of the finest institutions of its kind, it is also, as Hackbert suggested, comfortable with ambiguity and responsive to technological change. In 1989, it became the first graduate school of nursing to engage in distance learning, and in 2011, in partnership with several other institutions, it went entirely online. “Frontier Nursing was there for the people of the mountains,” Hackbert said. “And it could have stopped there, and survived. But to flourish, it needed to reinvent itself for the digital age. And when the college flourished, the entire region benefited.”

Graduate nursing candidates complete the bulk of their studies from a distance, but are also required to gather in Hyden several times during the course of their training. Hyden mayor Carol Graham Lewis Joseph told me that FNS has long been one of the town’s largest private employers, attracting students, graduates, and other visitors to local businesses: restaurants, hotels, campgrounds, and craft shops. When I asked if all of this had any real impact on the people in Hyden and the surrounding county, she laughed. “Of course it does. People might not make a lot, but they don’t need a lot.

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