Mary I. Nugent

Mary I. Nugent, a registered nurse, was Billerica's first public health nurse. The school physician had asked for years for a school or district nurse, and in March 1920 Town Meeting voted $1,200 "for the employment of a municipal nurse" and accepted a gift of $1,000 from the Public Health Nursing Association of the Billerica Red Cross toward the same purpose. Miss Nugent was engaged as the first Municipal Nurse, working under a Public Health Nursing Committee and visiting the sick in their homes, especially families who could not afford private nursing. In 1921 she reported 470 visits, 24 of them made after eight in the evening, and a gift from the Nineteen Hundred Club paid for baby scales and a basket.

When a new state requirement obliged the town to have a school nurse by September 1, 1921, the committee "released Miss Nugent" for the new post and engaged Freda Thommen as town nurse in her place, and Miss Nugent became Billerica's first School Nurse, working with the school physician, Dr. Maurice A. Buck. Her first report records 148 home visits and the placing of scales in the Pollard and Talbot Schools so that every pupil could be weighed and measured each month, and it ended with a plea for dental care: "I feel that a school dental clinic is the only solution for the care of the children's teeth in our schools." In the kindergarten she and Miss Thommen also weighed and measured the pupils' younger brothers and sisters.

For twenty-six years she was the only nurse for all of the town's schools. Her reports describe a daily inspection of every classroom, monthly inspection of heads, mouths and skin, sanitary inspection of the buildings, throat cultures sent to the State Board of Health, exclusions for ringworm, impetigo, scabies and head lice, first aid, and a steady round of home visits to see that defects found at school were corrected. She ran the school tuberculin testing clinic with the Middlesex County Sanatorium in the 1930s and arranged audiometer hearing tests under the State Department of Health around 1940, and in 1943 the school committee's list named her with Dr. Orland S. Marshall as the schools' health officers.

In September 1945 she was given a three months' leave of absence, and in April 1947 ill health forced her to resign. She died on November 17, 1947, at the age of 69. In its report for that year the School Department paid tribute to "her indomitable courage in carrying on her duties during the last few years of service," adding that "she gave most efficient, practical service in caring for the health needs of all our school children." Rita P. Freeman was elected to succeed her.

References

1. Billerica Town Report: Town officers, 1920 (Municipal Nurse: Miss Mary I. Nugent)
2. Billerica Town Report: Annual Town Meeting, March 1920, Articles 27 and 28 (appropriation for a municipal nurse; Red Cross gift)
3. Billerica Town Report: Report of the Public Health Nursing Committee, 1921 (released to become school nurse; her 1921 visits)
4. Billerica Town Report: Report of the School Nurse, 1921 (scales, home visits, plea for a school dental clinic; signed Mary Nugent)
5. Billerica Town Report: Report of the School Nurse and school tuberculin clinic, 1935 (signed Mary Nugent, R.N.)
6. Billerica Town Report: Report of the School Nurse, 1940 (audiometer tests; signed Mary I. Nugent, R.N.)
7. Billerica Town Report: Report of the Superintendent of Schools, 1945 (three months leave of absence)
8. Billerica Town Report: School Department, 1947, In Memoriam: Miss Mary I. Nugent (resigned April 1947, died November 17, 1947)
9. Billerica Town Report: Deaths registered in Billerica, 1947 (Mary I. Nugent, November 17, age 69)