Interview with Catherine Shean, July 18, 1988

Interview Summary

The interview covers 1942 to ca. 1983. Sister Shean graduated as CNM-Certified Nurse Midwife from CMI-Catholic Maternity Institute in 1948. She was instrumental in establishing CMI and fighting for its survival and became its director in 1963. She details the reasons for its closure in 1970, when she moved to Ghana and was on the faculty of the School of Midwifery for which she later was the director. She left Ghana around 1982 or 1983 when the enrolled nursing programs were closed and substituted for community nursing programs releasing community nurses into the rural areas while SRNs-state registered nurses worked in the governmental hospitals in the cities. A similar idea had been developed in the exchange between the two midwifery training centers in the U.S., at CMI in Santa Fe and at St. Vincent's Hospital in Philadelphia, training students in a rural setting as well as in a city hospital.
Sister Shean gives an extended outline of the history of CMI. She refers to Sister Rosemary Smyth's M.S. dissertation on "History of CMI and the Development of Midwifery" and remembers a doctoral dissertation by Sister Lucia Van der Erden on different aspects of Spanish-American culture and effects on maternity service in New Mexico which CMI used to build on. She mentions Dr. Anna Dengel, Dr. Rutherford, a consultant for MCH- Maternal and Child Health programs, and Archbishop Gerken (1887-1943). Others are: Dr. Roy DeFerraro, Sister Olivia (Gowan, OSB), Sister Theophane/Agnes Reinders, Sister Helen Herb, Dr. Nancy Campbell, Hattie Hemschemeyer, Pope Pius XII, Trappist monastery in Pecos.
Sister Shean's message: "To your own self be true". Finding joy in nurse midwifery and caring is important. It is important to cooperate with those that are trained to take care of special cases.

Interview LC Subject

Childbirth Maternal health services Midwifery Midwives Nursing--Study and teaching Shean, Catherine Shean, Catherine--Interviews

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