Katrina Hertzer

Katrina Elisabeth Hertzer was born in Tiffin, Ohio[1] and trained at the Illinois Training School for Nurses in Chicago,[2] graduating in the class of 1904.[3][4]

Hertzer was superintendent of nurses at a hospitals in Boone, Iowa and Saint Paul, Minnesota early in her career. She joined the U. S. Navy Nurse Corps in 1911.[5] In 1912, Hertzer was transferred from the naval hospital in Norfolk, Virginia to one at Chelsea, Massachusetts, where she started as acting Chief Nurse and was officially promoted to Chief Nurse soon after.[6][7]

Hertzer was a member of the American Red Cross's Mercy Ship expedition in 1914,[8] serving in Budapest with Helen Scott Hay and Josephine Beatrice Bowman.[9] "Serbs, Albanians, Hungarians, Croatians, Austrians, Montenegrins, and Russians began their long journey from the front on stretchers, ox-carts and hay wagons to the nearest railroad, where hospital trains brought them filthy, hungry, exhausted to us," she wrote of that work.[3] She also worked with prisoners of war in Siberia.[10]

In 1916, she was named Chief Nurse of the United States Navy Nurse Corps during World War I, stationed at American Red Cross headquarters in Washington D.C. She was the Navy Nurse Corps' liaison, to work with Jane Delano on nurse recruitment during wartime.[3] In 1921 her work with the American Red Cross ended.[11]

Katrina Hertzer died at a veterans' hospital in Madeira Beach, Florida in 1960, aged 86 years.[1] Her gravesite is at Arlington National Cemetery, as "Kathrina Elizabeth Hertzer".

• Katrina Hertzer at Find a Grave