Visiting Lecturer Sioban Nelson: Lecture/Webinar (Sept 16, 2026): The Tale of Miss Chen’s Trunk
Visiting Scholar Lecture & Nursing History Webinar
The Tale of Miss Chen’s Trunk: The Rockefeller Foundation’s global nursing intervention
- Guest Speaker: Dr. Sioban Nelson, RN, PhD, FCAHS, FCAN, FAAN, Professor Emeritus
- Date & Time: Sept. 16, 2026 @ 12-1pm PST
- Venue: Gateway Health Building – Room 5228 (or via Zoom)
REGISTER to attend in-person or online
Like the sweeping Nightingale movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Rockefeller Foundation constituted a powerful influence on the shape and substance of twentieth century nursing. Through its fellowship program, the foundation supported some thousand nurses from around the world to undertake further training, mostly in the United States and Canada. In this lecture, the opportunities and costs for the honour of being selected for a fellowship are evoked through the melancholy tale of a trunk abandoned by Chi Chen, a Chinese fellowship holder in the 1940s.
This truly global program, active from the 1920s to the 1960s, shaped the development of university-based nursing education around the world, expanding graduate education and creating public health nursing as an extended role based upon graduate qualifications. Leaving a chequered legacy of successes and failures in the adoption of American-style nursing education and training, the Rockefeller Foundation’s intervention highlights the geopolitical importance of nursing in the mid-twentieth century and the vulnerability of universalizing solutions to local political agendas.
Dr. Sioban Nelson
Dr. Sioban Nelson is a historian and policy scholar. Her historical interests include the history of nursing and material culture, pre-modern nursing, the impact of the Rockefeller Foundation on global nursing in the mid-20th century and the transnational history of nursing. Her policy interests include professional regulation, workplace violence, mobility and the global health workforce. Dr. Nelson served as Dean of the Lawrence Bloomberg Faculty of Nursing at the University of Toronto (2005-2013) and Vice Provost at the University of Toronto (2013-2018). She is a Charter Fellow of the Canadian Academy of Nurses and the Past President of the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences.