“Living legend” receives three national honors in 2003

Signe Cooper saw a lot during her nearly four decades in nursing: legal segregation of the races in 1940s Virginia, World War II casualties dying from infectious diseases because there were no antibiotics to treat them, and even a tiger rambling through the kitchen of the US Army psychiatric hospital in India where she was assigned as a nurse. Along the way, Cooper not only built an illustrious nursing career but became a nationally recognized historian of nursing as well.

But the year 2003 turned out to be one of the most distinguished in her long career. Cooper was the recipient this year of no fewer than three major honors, including being named a "Living Legend" by the American Academy of Nursing in November. In May, she was given the Lifetime Achievement Award from the UW–Madison Nurses' Alumni Organization and in September, Cooper received the President's Award from the American Association for the History of Nursing.

A retired professor at the UW–Madison School of Nursing, Cooper joined the Army Nurse Corps right after obtaining her nursing certificate from the school in 1943. She was stationed first at Ft. Belvoir, Va. A native of Iowa whose family moved to Madison in 1937, Cooper was astonished when she took a bus from Washington, D.C. to Virginia and saw black soldiers ordered to the back of the bus before it crossed the Virginia state line. (While the armed forces were segregated, the Army hospital was not.)

Soon after her statewide service, Cooper was sent to the 20th General Hospital in eastern India in September 1944. It was just before penicillin became widely available and she vividly remembers that most casualties died from infectious disease rather than war wounds. There was also no polio vaccine yet and she was devastated when one of her patients with that dreaded disease passed away.

Then she moved to the large hospital's psychiatric ward to take care of mentally ill patients. One day a tiger came into the kitchen of the compound and rattled the pots and pans – and apparently, the nerves of the staff. After that, Cooper was told not to do night rounds alone for a while.

Those are just a few of the memories Cooper brought back when she returned to Madison in 1946 and began an illustrious nursing career. She served as head nurse on the obstetric unit at UW Hospital in Madison for several years and, in 1948, moved to the School of Nursing, where she moved up the academic ranks to reach full professor in 1962. Cooper made a name for herself as a pioneer in continuing education for nurses; she traveled all over Wisconsin to bring up-to-date nursing information to practicing RNs. Later she served as associate dean for continuing education at the School of Nursing.

She also pursued a long-standing interest in history – both writing it and preserving artifacts and records. Cooper is widely published in the history of nursing and won a Wisconsin Sesquicentennial Commission contest for her article on the first Native American nurse in Wisconsin. She is well-known in the school for her prolific writing on the history of the nursing profession in the state and elsewhere.

"I've loved every job I've ever had," Cooper reflects. "Part of it was being in the right place at the right time, and I know I've been lucky. Would I go into nursing again? Yes, I would; it's a very satisfying kind of job."

Cooper retired from the School of Nursing in 1983 and currently lives in Middleton.