Louie Croft Boyd

Louie Croft Boyd dedicated her life to the nursing profession and to raising standards for nurses. A suffragette and newspaperwoman as a teenager, she came to Colorado because of her health. During her convalescence, she found a passion for nursing. Graduating from the Colorado Training School for Nurses in 1899, she did postgraduate work, earned a teaching certificate, and taught nursing in both Colorado and New Mexico. Boyd also taught Red Cross classes during World War I and helped organize a base hospital in Denver. In 1904 Louie helped found the Colorado State Trained Nurses Association, now the Colorado Nurses Association. Hired as the group’s first lobbyist, she wrote the bill presented to the Colorado General Assembly to create legal licensure for nurses. Upon passage of the bill, Boyd applied for and became the first licensed nurse in Colorado. She served on the State Board of Nursing Examiners and was superintendent of nurses at Denver General, St. Luke’s in Denver, Wyoming General in Rock Springs, Wyoming, and the Rio Grande Hospital in Salida. Boyd retired in 1941 because of blindness from glaucoma. When she died in 1951, she willed her body to the University of Colorado School of Medicine for the study of glaucoma.

Louie Croft Boyd

State Registration for Nurses, Part 1
State Registration for Nurses, Part 2
Colorado Training for Nurses
History of Denver General Hospital
The Nurse and the Tuberculour Patient