By Claire Foote & Bonita Quiroz-Cantu

From Brooklyn, New York, to East Lansing, Michigan, from Ibara Orile, Nigeria to winters in Spain, as emergency room clerk, psychiatric nurse, commercial clam fisher, construction worker, professor, anthropologist, chief of a Nigerian village, mentor to many, and “grandfather” of AAPPN, Oliver H. Osborne’s life and work have spanned the globe for more than half a century.

The year was 1949. Nineteen-year-old Oliver Osborne worked as a messenger in the ER at a Brooklyn, New York hospital while attending law school. He saw a man exiting an ambulance, wearing a white uniform, asked him what his work was, and learned he was a nurse. This man told Oliver –– who had never heard of a male nurse — that nursing was a great profession. Oliver took his advice, earning his R.N., then a bachelor’s degree in nursing.

1958. “This is not for you,” he was told by a nursing supervisor when he wanted to pursue a master’s degree. Characteristically, Oliver’s response was “Why not?” He then won a competitive New York Regents scholarship for advanced nursing study.

“Why not?” may be his mantra. He needed it again when a nursing professor told him he wasn’t PhD material. In 1968, Oliver H. Osborne, RN, MA, earned his doctorate in social-cultural anthropology at Michigan State University.

His PhD research led him to the village of Ibara Orile, Nigeria, to study Yoruba villages as therapeutic communities. The Ibara people have three traditional chieftaincy societies: merchant, warrior, and Ogboni (the Holders of the Earth). Oliver was invited to become a member of the Ogboni. During that time, despite violent unrest in other Nigerian communities, Ibara Orile remained peaceful. Subsequently, the village recognized Oliver’s role in preserving the peace by making him a chief (Adila of Ibara).

“Why not?” may have been his answer to a call from Dean Mary Tschudin of the University of Washington School of Nursing in 1969, inviting him to leave his teaching post at Wayne State University in Detroit to become chairman of the psychiatric-mental health nursing program. That invitation offered him a chance to develop the department’s programs and help establish the nursing PhD program. Always working from a cultural and social orientation, Oliver encouraged the department’s evolution from a psychiatric and hospital orientation to a community and mental health focus: “Psychosocial Nursing.” Throughout his career as a professor in nursing and adjunct professor in anthropology he continued his international health care research and consultations.

During the early 1980s, Washington State experienced a financial crisis. Throughout the university, departments were asked to sacrifice. The Department of Psychosocial Nursing was on the cutting block. Even as Oliver worked within the School to save the department, he knew that the most effective effort must come from its practicing graduates. He asked faculty members Marilyn Whitley and Linn Larson to identify and work with community oriented graduates who would actively lobby to preserve the department. The joint effort of the faculty and these community activists helped save the deaprtment. These community activists formed the Northwest Association of Clinical Specialists in Psychosocial Nursing(NWACSPSN), now AAPPN.

Oliver’s vision for the organization was that it would belong to the community of advanced practice psychosocial nurses as an entity distinct from the university. He believed that as such, this organization could support the Department of Psychosocial Nursing, and the department could support NWACSPSN.

Oliver retired in 1996. He and his wife run a bed & breakfast on Capitol Hill and live in Spain several months a year. He took up the violin after a lapse of nearly 50 years, and plays with an orchestra made up mainly of Boeing employees. A great pleasure has been to travel with his eight grandchildren, providing them opportunities to learn about the world. As it has always been, Oliver’s life is about possibilities, unhampered by race, creed, or gender. “Why not?”