am honored to be here today and indebted to you for this cordial invitation to deliver the Anita N. Dorr Memorial Address. It is altogether fitting that Mrs. Dorr be remembered in this way, by the organization that she was instrumental in founding. The continued and increasing success of EDNA assures Mrs. Dorr a place in history as one of the great leaders of American nursing...and justifies, in no small way, the sacrifices she made on behalf of her profession.Time passes swiftly and the events of today are soon forgotten. The media presents us with an uninterrupted stream of events that boggle the mind. Today, more than ever, it is difficult to maintain any historic perspective. The sheer mass of information, with the instant replays, makes it impossible to assemble in a time frame the events of the past, today, and of the future. Thus, in our confusion, we find ourselves living simultaneously in the past, the present, and the future.So in order to orient ourselves today, and since Mrs. Dorr was largely unknown to many of you, it might be useful to recall the events that led to the creation of EDNA and to some of the work of Mrs. Dorr.Prior to 1963, virtually nothing had been done by the major medical organizations in an organized way to improve the training and skills of ambulance attendants and emergency department nurses. In 1963, in May, at Chicago's Fire Academy on De Koven Street, the American College of Surgeons Committee on Trauma held its first three day course for ambulance attendants. This meeting was an instant success and was duplicated in the next two years by other American College of Surgeons' chapters in other This article was originally published in JEN in the January-February issue of 1975.
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