Gladys Brandt Morden

Gladys Brandt was born in Petersburg which had been founded by her grandfather Peter Wilker. She graduated from Wingham Business College and the Chicago Teachers’ College. She taught school in Ontario, Saskatchewan and Indiana. After graduating from Toronto General Hospital, she held top administrative posts at Utica and Rome, N.Y., Wellesley Hospital, Toronto, and Collingwood. Morden was the first graduate nurse in Canada to head a clinic on birth control and was manager of the A.R. Kaufman- sponsored clinic in Toronto from 1933 to 1939.

She was responsible for getting reforms at Kingston Penitentiary, slum clearance in Atlantic City, N.J., a crackdown on swindlers and organized the League for Race Betterment in Toronto. She organized a branch of the Victorian Order of Nurses, Collingwood and was active in the I.O.D.E. and Red Cross for forty years. When she retired to Elmira, she worked with the Elmira and District Association for the Retarded.