Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1176470
20 Working Nurse l WorkingNurse.com October 14–November 18, 2019 PROFILES IN NURSING by Aaron Severson and Elizabeth Hanink, RN, BSN, PHN S he'd never even flown before, but in 1943, 2nd Lt. Elsie Ott, RN, became the U.S. Army's first flight nurse, assigned to the first-ever intercontinental medical evacuation flight: a seven-day, 11,000-mile odyssey that took her and five patients from Karachi to Washington, D.C. Rare Air In the '30s and '40s, many Americans had never been on an airplane. Commercial air travel was less comfortable and vastly more expensive than traveling by ship or train. If you lived far from an airport or air- field, you might never have even seen a plane except in newsreels. Born in Smithtown, Long Island, and trained at Lenox Hill Hospital School of Nursing in New York City, Elsie Ott was somewhat more cosmopolitan than many Americans who served during World War II. Even so, she remained a stranger to air travel even after joining the U.S. Army Nurse Corps in September 1941. When her unit, the 159th Station Hospital, trans- ferred to Karachi (in what is now Pakistan) in February 1942, they traveled by sea. Nevertheless, in early 1943, Ott was selected for an extremely ambitious assignment: the Army's first interconti- nental medical evacuation flight. Healthcare on the Fly Until the disastrous military setbacks in the Pacific forced the issue in 1941–42, the U.S. Army was surprisingly ambivalent about the idea of medical evacuation by air. There had been experiments with air ambulances since before WWI, but early setbacks had soured the Army brass's enthusiasm. It wasn't until October 1942 that the Army Air Forces (USAAF) attempted to launch the first training pro- grams for flight surgeons and flight nurses at Bowman Army Air Field in Kentucky. Ott wasn't part of this early program. In fact, it wouldn't be until months later that she received any flight nurse training at all. On Jan. 16, 1943, however, her superi- ors gave her 24 hours to prepare an Air Transport Command C-47 transport to carry five seriously ill patients from Karachi back to Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C., a journey of more than 10,000 miles. So disorganized was this effort that Ott received no medical instructions or supply list for her patients, whose conditions Elsie Ott, RN (1913–2006) One WWII nurse's grueling, globe-spanning medevac flight A WING AND A PRAYER At the end of her amazing 11,000-mile medevac flight, Elsie Ott said she was so tired that "I had to surreptitiously pull out my dog tag to find out what my name was." Photo, left: For her efforts, Ott became the first woman ever to receive the Air Medal. Ironically, she didn't even hear about the Army's flight nurse training program until after her historic flight. Right: Ott unloading a transport on a later flight to Calcutta, 1944. Trousers were much more practical than the skirt she'd had to wear in 1943. Photos: U.S. Air Force Ott received no medical instructions or supply list for her patients, whose conditions ranged from tuberculosis and polio to severe manic depression.