As a longtime dean of the University of Pittsburgh School of Nursing, Enid Goldberg helped transform the profession locally by expanding nurses' opportunities to earn advanced degrees.

In the 1970s, she helped to establish one of the first training programs in the nation for nurse practitioners, part of a movement in health care that was - and to some degree, still is - controversial, said Ellen Ruddy, the current dean of Pitt's nursing school.

Nurse practitioners are registered nurses who have earned master's degrees or completed other graduate work. They perform physical examinations, order diagnostic studies, interpret results and initiate treatment of many patient conditions.

"At that time it was still very much that nurses were seen as the handmaidens to physicians and she helped nursing get beyond that," Ruddy said.

Mrs. Goldberg, who served as dean from 1973 to 1991, died yesterday of lung cancer. She was 74.

Ruddy said Mrs. Goldberg was supportive of initiatives that advanced the nursing profession. That includes the current push by nurse practitioners in Pennsylvania to get the Legislature to give them the power to write prescriptions for patients - a freedom nurse practitioners enjoy to varying degrees in 46 states, but one which has been strongly opposed by doctors here.

Upon her retirement as dean, Mrs. Goldberg, who lived in Squirrel Hill, told The Pittsburgh Press that the school's biggest and most important change during her years of leadership was the opening of the Center for Nursing Research in the early 1980s.

Ruddy said the center still functions and is key to the school's current ranking among the Top 10 money winners of nursing schools funded by grants from the National Institutes of Health.

Although she stepped down as dean, Mrs. Goldberg remained active at the nursing school, writing a history of the school and teaching undergraduate and graduate courses.

During those years the positive relationship Mrs. Goldberg maintained with the school and her successor was a testimonial to her professionalism, said Dr. Thomas Detre, executive vice president for international and academic programs at the UPMC Health System.

"She was a tough but very fair academic administrator," said Detre, who was Mrs. Goldberg's direct supervisor during his years as senior vice chancellor of health sciences at Pitt. "I enjoyed her company and she was, as I hope I was, a very straightforward and honest person."

Mrs. Goldberg graduated from Bellevue High School in 1943. In those days, women who wanted a career chose between teaching and nursing, Mrs. Goldberg told The Press, so she chose nursing. She earned her nursing degree from St. Francis Hospital of Pittsburgh in 1946 before going on to earn bachelor's, master's and doctorate degrees from Pitt during the 1950s and ' 60s.

"When she was raising me in the late 1950s, women didn't go to work," said her son, David Goldberg of Squirrel Hill. "She took some heat for it in the neighborhood. ... That's a certain personality to work against the norm."

In addition to serving in many national and state nursing organizations, Mrs. Goldberg was a founding member of both the Pennsylvania Higher Education Nursing Schools Inc. and the Mid-Atlantic Regional Nursing Association. She received the 1981 Honorary Recognition Award from the Pennsylvania Nurses Association for distinguished service to the profession.

Mrs. Goldberg was preceded in death by her husband, Maurice Goldberg. Besides her son she is survived by a daughter, Beryl Wingenroth, 39, of Penn Hills, and three grandchildren.

Visitation will be from noon to 1 p.m. Sunday at Burton L. Hirsch Chapel, 2704 Murray Ave., Squirrel Hill. Services at the funeral home will begin at 1 p.m.

Donations can be made to the Enid Goldberg Visiting Lectureship Fund, University of Pittsburgh School of Nursing, Room 350, 3500 Victoria St., Pittsburgh 15261.