She recalls being the only caregiver on duty in an entire urology unit for her first overnight shift

Jackie Sweetwood Brownfield (DIPLO '51)

and leading a women’s orthopedic and pulmonary unit—all as a student nurse. After graduating from UVA’s Diploma program in 1951, 19-year-old Jackie Sweetwood (later Brownfield) accepted then-director of nursing education Roy C. Beasley’s offer to work as head nurse in the hospital’s Barringer wing.

Over the next three years, she lived in several apartments around Charlottesville before moving back into McKim Hall nursing student housing. Each time her roommates would get married, and move out, she recalls, she’d have to find a new place to live and new roommates.

“I guess I was an old maid by that time,” she jokes.

In the early 1950s, Barringer wing was a 15-room unit reserved for VIP patients. Dinner service often included steak or seafood. An intrepid young nurse who’d left her family’s home in Arlington to pursue education and spread her wings, Jackie felt challenged but not scared.

“At that age, you think you can do it all,” she says.

Her mother and father brought her to Charlottesville in 1948 to attend UVA’s 36-month nursing program, where she was one of about 50 young women studying to become nurses. While their uniforms, meals, and housing costs were covered, her parents occasionally sent her spending money by mail. Party dresses were purchased on lay-away from Corner department stores. And tuition, which she paid in full each semester, cost $55. She knows the exact amount because she kept the handwritten receipt, along with various other treasures: a stack of postcard-size invitations to school dances with handwritten notes on the back; scraps of paper with patient notes; small photographs of friends and peers in their nursing pinafores and at dances; printed school handbooks, dietary and caregiving regulations, and UVA Hospital protocol manuals. When she recently met with Dean Marianne Baernholdt, they chuckled at how she’d used every scrap of paper available to her for notetaking.

An only child who was inspired by an aunt who worked in public health, Jackie saved her money so she could enjoy a rich social life. She laughs at the memory of how students would socialize through the evening and then report to work or class early the next morning, getting by with little to no sleep. It didn’t matter, she says. “We were just so grateful to be here.”

"We were just so grateful to be here."

Alumna Jackie Sweetwood Brownfield (DIPLO '51)

Social life centered around dances, athletic events, and concerts. She saw Tommy Dorsey at Memorial Gymnasium, and Louis Armstrong. A sense of community was ever-present. 

“You never went out alone,” she recalls. “You always went out with a date.”

On one such evening, she met her forever date, Irv Brownfield. They married in 1954, and Jackie settled into her new caregiving role as wife and mother, raising two daughters and two sons. The couple was married for over 60 years before he died in 2016. She still lives in the home they built in Charlottesville, and has remained active with the School of Nursing Alumni Association, including helping plan the School’s 100^th anniversary celebration in 2006, the same year her husband surprised her with a commissioned painting by artist Richard Crozier titled “Nurse Jackie” that hangs in McLeod Hall, a proud testament to UVA’s early nurses and Jackie’s lifelong love.

View photos of the summer 2025 reunions event on Flickr, including the induction of the newest Thomas Jefferson Society members (50 years since graduation).