Alta Bates

Alta Alice Miner Bates was an American nurse anesthetist and the founder of the hospital that is now part of Alta Bates Summit Medical Center in California. Born in Lapeer, Michigan, on 11 December 1879, she moved with her family to Northern California and was the first nurse to graduate from the Eureka Training School for Nurses, finishing her training in 1903 at Sequoia Hospital in Eureka. She became the first registered nurse in Humboldt County and later the first nurse anesthetist in the San Francisco Bay Area. In 1904 she cared for mothers and newborns in her parents' Berkeley home, and in 1905 she opened an eight-bed sanitarium for women and children that also trained nurses. It grew into a six-story, 112-bed hospital renamed Alta Bates Hospital in 1928. She directed it until 1949, gave more than 14,000 anesthetics, trained over 330 nurses, and died on 30 November 1955.