If you were born in the second Prince County Hospital (1951-2004) in Summerside, PEI, as I was in October 1966, you were born on Beattie Avenue, named in honour of Summerside nurse Grace Beattie. Her death announcement in the May 12, 1950 Charlottetown Guardian outlines a career and devotion to the nursing profession that would be difficult to imagine being equalled by many other people.
She left the world in the hospital she helped create, just before the old building became surplus with the opening of the new facility, Grace nor the old PCH wanting to exist without the other.
Death of Miss Grace Beattie Widely Mourned
Many old friends in this Province and abroad will regret to learn of the death in the Prince County Hospital on Wednesday night of Miss Grace Beattie at the age of 91 years. She was the first superintendent of the Prince County Hospital and during the past five and a half years she resided there, in the institution she had helped so greatly to organize.
The deceased was a daughter of the late Thomas and Margaret Howatt Beattie of Summerside and received her early education here. Taking up the nursing profession as her life’s work, she graduated from MacLean Hospital at Waverley, Mass., in 1889 and from the General Hospital in Boston in 1893. During that year she was appointed assistant superintendent of Quincy, Mass. Hospital and two years later she organized the Brockton Mass. Hospital and School of Nursing. Here she remained until 1912 when due to illness she resigned and returned to her home town where during her rest period she organized the Prince County Hospital School for Nurses, which had been officially opened about a month previous by the Duke of Connaught during his visit to the Province as Governor General of Canada.
She returned to the United States in 1912 and during the next 17 years her outstanding ability as an organizer was recognized by the leading hospital authorities throughout New England. She was, during that time, entrusted with the organizing and superintending of a number of hospitals and schools of nursing among which was the hospital at North Adams, Mass., and during the First World War she reorganized the lthaca, New York, Hospital where she remained until 1922. She was then appointed superintendent of Elliot Hospital, Manchester, N. H., and while there suffered the misfortune of a broken hip and for two years after was unable to carry on the work of her chosen profession.
After her recovery from the result of the accident, she assumed the superintendent’s position of the Johnston Memorial Hospital, Stafford Springs, Conn., which was run by graduate nurses.
She retired from hospital work in 1929, and although she had then reached the age of 70 years she went to Boston where she took a special course in religious art.
She returned to Summerside in 1940 where she lived until about five and a half years ago and then entered the Prince County Hospital and remained there until the time of her death on Wednesday night.
She is survived by one sister, Mrs. Maynard Schurman, Summerside.
The funeral will take place on Friday when the remains will be taken from the Compton Funeral Home to the Central Street Church of Christ for service at 2.30 P. M.