Mary Starke Harper Distinguished Lectureship

The 2009 Mary Starke Harper Distinguished Lectureship honored
Mary Starke Harper, RN, PhD, FAAN (1919–2006)
through a panel session focusing on how Mary Starke Harper promoted interdisciplinary collaboration by mentoring across disciplines
and served as a champion for interdisciplinary/transdisciplinary
research in other ways. Special attention was paid to Dr. Harper’s
last lecture which emphasized the importance of common sense.

Mary Starke Harper, RN, PhD, FAAN (1919–2006)
“My life has been dedicated to improving clinical training, practices, education, research, clinical competence, as well as common sense… Today what is referred to as cultural competence needs to integrate more common sense and respect as well.”

Shortly before her death, Mary Starke Harper donated a collection of her personal papers to the Barbara Bates Center for the Study of the History of Nursing, University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing, Philadelphia. The collection consists primarily of research files which Dr. Harper assembled from 1972–1988, when she held leadership posts at the National Institute of Mental Health, and read, spoke, and wrote widely on all facets of geropsychiatric nursing and the care of the minority elderly. The files contain texts of many of the 180 articles and 5 books in which
Dr. Harper addressed issues ranging from overmedication, institutional
mistreatment, and undiagnosed mental illness as problems among the elderly, drawing insights from her own long career as a nurse educator, researcher, and colleague of many thousands of health professionals who benefitted from the NIH’s Minority Fellowship Program which she directed. In addition to the manuscript files, the collection contains hundreds of pamphlets and other printed items. Together these materials represent an enormously valuable resource for understanding the development of geriatric nursing; the emergent awareness of specific illnesses of the elderly such as Alzheimer’s; and one nurse leader’s unceasing efforts to learn more about the needs of elderly African American, Native American, and Asian American populations.

For further information about the Dr. Mary Starke Harper Collection, please
contact the Curator of the Bates Center at 215.898.0524; or e-mail:
nhistory@nursing.upenn.edu. General information about the Bates Center
is available on the Web: http://www.nursing.upenn.edu/history/.