the nurse. From that moment on the first specialization in clinical nursing was born and those in that specialty were named nurse anesthetists,(Thatcher,1952,p11).The earliest documentation of anesthetic care given to a patient by a nurse was the work done by Sister Mary Bernard in 1887. She was a catholic nun who worked at the St. Vincent hospital in Erie Pennsylvania,(Thatcher,1952,p 12). The nurse anesthetists of that time were trained by physicians at first, but as time went on the nurses took a more active role in the study and research of anesthetics and eventually surpassed their teachers in the field of anesthesiology. This advance led to role reversal, where the teacher became the student and the student became the teacher. By 1909 the first formal educational program designed for nurse anesthetists was started at St. Vincents Hospital in Portland Oregon,(Evans,1995,p 3). Upon graduation from the school, the nurse anesthetists were placed in all sorts of settings. Most impressive were the teaching positions held by nurses in the medical schools of that time. They became the primary instructors of anesthetic to medical students. The nurse anesthetist also held positions in the battlefields. During World War One, the American nurse anesthetist was the primary health giver to troops in the European theaters of combat. While at war the American nurses influenced other foreign nurses and that led to the spread of nurse anesthetists throughout the world. With the wars came a sharp increase in the demand of anesthetists, and this in turn increased the number of institutions needed for training and broadened the criteria for educating the nurses. By the end of war it was evident that the nurse anesthetist was an invaluable profession that had established itself as one of the most important of all in medicine. With all of this growth and evolution it became necessary that the profession of nurse anesthetists needed to have some stru...
