Mary Irma Hilger

Sister Mary Irma Hilger (July 12, 1917 – February 22, 2003) was an American religious sister, who trained as a nurse and founded the St. Jude Hospital and nurse's training school on the Caribbean island of St. Lucia. She has been called the "Florence Nightingale of St. Lucia". Early life Mary Irma Hilger was born on July 12, 1917, in Ost, Reno County, Kansas to Katherine May and Peter M. Hilger. She joined the Sisters of the Sorrowful Mother in 1935 and went on to obtain a bachelor's degree and master's degree in nursing from Saint Louis University, in St. Louis, Missouri. Career In 1955, Hilger became the supervisor of obstetrics at St. Francis Hospital in Wichita, Kansas. In 1961, she was posted to St. Lucia in the West Indies, along with four other sisters. Her master's work had concerned the feasibility of establishing a nursing training program on the island. The nurses began their training program, the first nursing school on the island, at the Victoria Hospital in Castries. Traversing the island in 1962, Hilger discovered an abandoned military hospital on the former United States Beane Air Force Base facility, near Vieux Fort which had been closed in 1947. She began negotiating with the government to repurpose the buildings. By the beginning of 1964, the Sisters of the Sorrowful Mother received donated land from the Devaux family. The following year, Hilger took businessman Hogarth Belizaire to evaluate the military site and they approached Chief Minister John Compton with their plan. The government agreed to the plan in 1965 and after several months of rehabilitating the property, which had been unused for twenty years, the hospital officially opened on September 5, 1966. Operating as a charity hospital at no charge to patients and a school, the first class of nurses graduated in October 1969. Hilger was the hospital administrator until 1976.