Lena Angevine Warner is rightfully known as Tennessee’s pioneer nurse. Lena Angevine, born in Grenada, MS, in 1869, was the only member of her immediate family to survive the yellow fever epidemics of 1877 and 1878.
Raised by her grandmother, Lena attended St. Mary’s Episcopal School in Memphis, and, in 1887, became the first student accepted at the Memphis Training School for Nurses. She studied further in Chicago, was briefly married to E.C. Warner, and, in 1898, became the first superintendent of nurses at the new City of Memphis Hospital.
