Hulda Margaret Lyttle was born in 1889 in Nashville, Tennessee to David and Rebecca Lyttle. Rebecca Lyttle worked for Dr. Smiley Blanton, a practicing Nashville physician, caring for his sick stepmother. Because of the superior health care Rebecca Lyttle gave Dr. Blanton’s stepmother, he told her he would make sure, through his help, that Hulda would be able to pursue her dream of a nursing career.
After receiving her primary education, Lyttle entered the first class of George W. Hubbard Hospital’s Training School for Nurses—later known as the School of Nursing at Meharry Medical College—in September 1910. She soon gained recognition as a superb scholar, one who rendered quality care to her patients. Lyttle became so proficient in operating room techniques that attending physicians were known to specifically request her assistance in their operations. A person of compassion, Lyttle preferred assignments which enabled her to work with the less fortunate and the charity patients. She believed “they needed the most and best attention available.”
In 1913, Lyttle, along with Rhonda A. Pugh and Lula Woolfolk, became the school’s first graduates. Dr. Blanton soon made good on his promise. So she could continue her studies, he recommended Lyttle to the superintendent of nurses at New York’s Lincoln Hospital School of Nursing, one of the few schools in New York City that accepted African Americans.
Lyttle was considered one of the most outstanding graduates of Meharry Medical College’s School of Nursing. Three years after her retirement, on June 23, 1946, the student nurses’ residence was named Hulda Margaret Lyttle Hall. In September of 1960, the Meharry board of trustees voted to close the nursing school due to the mounting debt and the loss of its senior nurses. When Lyttle became aware of the board’s actions, she mounted an aggressive fund-raising campaign to secure a plaque listing all of the names of Meharry’s School of Nursing graduates. Successful in her efforts, a commemorative bronze plaque was placed in the lobby of Hubbard Hospital.
