Bertha Harmer

Bertha Harmer was a Canadian nurse, educator and writer, remembered above all for her Textbook of the Principles and Practice of Nursing, first published in 1922. Born in Port Hope, Ontario, and raised in Toronto, she worked as a bookkeeper before training as a nurse at Toronto General Hospital, graduating in 1913 at the head of her class. She studied at Teachers College, Columbia University, and taught nursing at St. Luke's Hospital in New York, where she wrote her textbook, then taught at the Yale School of Nursing and helped run nursing at the New Haven Hospital from 1923 to 1926 or 1927. Her second book, on teaching nursing, followed in 1926. In 1928 she became director of the School for Graduate Nurses at McGill University in Montreal, where she worked to keep the school open through the Depression. She resigned in 1934 because of ill health and died that year. Her textbook was revised after her death and kept her name through later editions. Sources differ on her birth year, 1885 in the Wikipedia article and 1880 in the Dictionary of Canadian Biography.