Pioneering Nurse

Ella Phillips Crandall was a leader in public health nursing who spent much of her career battling disease, filth and poverty in American city slums.  Crandall, who was born on this date in 1871, graduated from the Philadelphia General Hospital School of Nursing and returned to her home in Dayton, Ohio, to become assistant superintendent of the Miami Valley Hospital and the first director of its school of nursing.  Under her leadership, the failing institution was turned into a modern hospital and nursing school.  In 1909, she became a supervisor in the Henry Street Visiting Nurse Service in New York City.  An indomitable spirit, in one year (before the era of planes or buses) she traveled more than 82,000 miles, giving speeches to nurses’ groups, chambers of commerce, industrialists and civic clubs.  Under her leadership, the National Organization for Public Health Nursing grew rapidly.

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