Mrs. Chase first entered service in 1911 at Hartford Hospital Training School in Connecticut.

Three years later, she made a big splash when she appeared at a nurses’ convention in St. Louis. For the next six decades, this 5’ 4” white manikin with painted facial features and hair would become a staple of nursing education the world over, giving generations of students practice in clinical fundamentals. 

The Bjoring Center for Nursing Historical Inquiry preserves, in good condition, a white “Baby Chase” that was used for obstetrics and infant-care demonstrations during the first roughly 60 years of the 20th century. Crafted in 1914 by doll maker Martha Jenkins Chase, it is made of durable stuff: cloth stockinette stiffened with a resinous substance called sizing, then brushed with oil paint and varnish. 

Student nurses learned how to bathe, bandage, and safely move these proxy patients, as well as to administer hypodermic injections. Over time, the M.J. Chase Co. added orifices to the dolls for skill-building in bladder catheterizations and nasogastric tube insertions. By the 1940s, at the request of the U.S. Army, the company introduced an adult male manikin, too. Records do not indicate when the School of Nursing acquired its first Mrs. Chase, but she was not retired until the late 1960s, when sophisticated simulators emerged in response to advances in medicine and growing specialization—and the demand for increasingly advanced nurse training and education.  

Today, the School has a 12-member manikin family—including “Ricky” and “Lucy,” premature twins that mimic babies born between 23- and 27-weeks' gestation—as well as dozens of computerized body parts, including a $65,000 wearable mechanized pregnant belly worn by a standardized patient that brings obstetrics simulations to a new level.