Natalie Josef Curtis (1 March 1889–6 June 1968), hospital superintendent, was born in Petersburg and was the daughter of Patrick Henry Curtis, an Irish immigrant, and Mollie M. Bannan Curtis. About 1895 the family moved to Richmond, where her father worked as a traveling salesman. Inspired by her mother's charity work, Curtis in 1910 entered the nursing school at the Philadelphia Orthopedic Hospital and Infirmary for Nervous Diseases. She graduated in 1913 and received specialized training at other Philadelphia-area institutions, including the Episcopal and obstetrical hospitals. While in school she became lifelong friends with a fellow nursing student, Hazel Hill, of Columbus, Ohio.
After returning to Richmond, Curtis enrolled in a new public health course that the state health commissioner had instituted. She convinced Hill to join her, and after the six-week class Curtis took a position with the Richmond Department of Public Health and Hill was assigned to a milk station. By 1919 Curtis had become the assistant superintendent at Tucker Sanatorium, a private psychiatric facility. Her leadership qualities and dedication to her profession attracted the attention of the state inspector of nurses' training schools, who encouraged Curtis to apply for the position of superintendent of Sheltering Arms Hospital.
Sheltering Arms Free Hospital had been founded in Richmond in 1889 as a private facility offering free medical services. By early in the 1920s it was suffering from a rapid turnover in administration and had recently failed to meet state standards for nurses' training. Offered the job in April 1922, Curtis arrived at her new post to find the institution in complete disarray, with too few qualified nurses, too little essential equipment, and a foundering nursing program. Realizing she needed help, Curtis prevailed on Hill to join her staff in October and to take on much of the responsibility for training the nurses. Together, during their tenure the two women taught more than three hundred nurses. Curtis begged, borrowed, and bartered for much-needed educational and operating room equipment. She even placed a donation box in the operating room and charged doctors a quarter every time they used profanity. Through her hard work, determination, and never-ending supply of resourcefulness and inspiration, the hospital began to prosper. Once the physical state of the hospital was restored and the nurses' training program placed back on course, Curtis turned her efforts toward obtaining accreditation for the hospital, which she achieved in 1926.
Under the able leadership of Curtis, Sheltering Arms continued to expand and improve. A twelve-room house donated in 1929 became a nurses' residence, and a new wing added in 1941 increased capacity to 103 patients. Donations decreased during the Great Depression, but the hospital was still able to provide hot meals for neighborhood children and added many unemployed nurses to the staff. Sheltering Arms discontinued its training school for nurses in 1934, but a nursing shortage during World War II led to the establishment of its school for practical nurses in 1944. Curtis, a Catholic, received an apostolic benediction from Pope Pius XII in 1951 for her tireless efforts on behalf of the poor and the sick through her work at the hospital. Curtis retired as superintendent on 31 December 1954. She and Hill traveled for a short time, and after returning to Richmond they lived together and volunteered at the Medical College of Virginia hospital, where in 1956 they received recognition as Volunteers of the Year.
Although she never married, Curtis became the foster mother of a boy who arrived at Sheltering Arms in 1923 as a three-month-old baby. His mother was dying and his father was unwilling or unable to raise him alone, so Curtis took responsibility for his care. Natalie Josef Curtis died in Richmond on 6 June 1968 and was buried in Saint Joseph's Cemetery, in Petersburg.
Sources Consulted: Birth Register, Petersburg, Bureau of Vital Statistics (BVS), Commonwealth of Virginia Department of Health, Record Group 36, Library of Virginia; biographical information in Sheltering Arms Rehabilitation Hospital Records (1889–1989), Virginia Museum of History and Culture, Richmond; family information provided by foster son Thomas J. Curtis (2002); Richmond Times-Dispatch, 16 June 1935; Richmond News Leader, 18 Apr. 1951, 25 Oct. 1954; Richmond Catholic Virginian, 20, 27 Apr. 1951; Eda Carter Williams, Sheltering Arms Hospital, Richmond, Virginia, 1889–1949 (1949); Nita Ligon Morse and Eda Carter Williams, The History of Sheltering Arms Hospital: The First 75 Years, 1889–1964 (1964), 12–13; Anne Rutherford Lower, Sheltering Arms Hospital: A Centennial History (1889–1989) (1989), 88–98 (several portraits); obituaries in Richmond News Leader and Richmond Times-Dispatch, both 7 June 1968.