The Bellevue Classification System (BCS), named after New York City's once famed Bellevue School of Nursing, was a system of library classification created specifically for the intellectual control of libraries within hospital-based nurse training schools. Devised and completed during the early 1930's, Bellevue instructor and nurse Ann Doyle, with the assistance of librarian-consultant Mary Casamajor, modeled the BCS upon a decimal plan, with all major subjects important to nursing divided among ten main classes. The history of the BCS provides a unique angle to analyze and appreciate an occupation's intellectual and professional identity development. When understood as a cultural object, the BCS emerges as unique intellectual platform that reflected a particular moment in time and nursing's particularly gendered relationship to knowledge. Nurse educators of the early to mid-20th century conceptualized the library as the physical manifestation of nursing's intellect. The BCS was a unique development of this nursing library movement. Other classification systems such as the Dewey Decimal Classification System, Library of Congress Classification System, Ballard (Boston Medical Library) Classification System, and the National Health Library Classification system failed to resonate with the American nursing identity envisioned by Ann Doyle. These systems though, served Ann Doyle as both catalysts and reference points. The Bellevue Classification System provided Doyle the opportunity to construct and promote a distinct viewpoint of nursing knowledge. Specifically, the BCS allowed Doyle to portray nursing as discipline with an intellectual, professional, and distinctly gendered identity. This research spans from just prior to 1934, the year the BCS was first published in outline format within the pages of the American Journal of Nursing, until 1969 when the Bellevue School of Nursing ceased functioning as an independent educational institution, merging operations with Hunter College. By the year 1969, the Bellevue Classification System had also transitioned, from an active symbol of nursing's intellectual and professional identity to a vestige of nursing's fading past
