The association is today what its name implies—The National Association of First Aid in America. It is to the American people what the St. John Ambulance Association is to England, and the St. Andrews Ambulance Association is to Scotland. It is a college of National First Aid instruction—offering one textbook, one course of lectures, one examination, one diploma in kind for all.
For the past nine years, since the death of the Founder, it has given service the Clara Barton way—promptly, efficiently, thoroughly—and its classes send forth each year hundreds of National First Aid graduates who are capable men and women, and who wear the little medallion of National First Aid service (which only a graduate may purchase and wear), out into a world of suffering humanity. Word of their activities comes back to national headquarters from many fields—even from far off India, South America, and the Hawaiian Islands. One graduate sent back word from the Soudan, Africa, “What would we have done without National First Aid when there is only one medical doctor to every 500,000 natives?”
Clara Barton said of The National First Aid Association of America: “Another work reaches out its hands to me and I have taken them. The humane and far sighted are pressing to its standard—the standard of organized First Aid to the Injured.”
The true history of Clara Barton should not leave out the work of The National First Aid Association of America, Clara Barton’s last work. If so, the history of the great philanthropist becomes an unfinished record. The association stands today as a working memorial to Clara Barton. It continues to serve the American people under her name. Without ostentation it continues its humane service, making friends, sending forth efficient graduates, and carrying systematic and organized First Aid instruction to every part of the country.
By a leading cosmopolitan newspaper: “It is said that every year more than 11,000,000 persons, about one-tenth of the total population of the United States, fall downstairs, get run over, drown, lean too far out of the window or peer into a gun they ‘didn’t think was loaded,’ meeting death or injury in these and kindred ways. Statisticians say that, when war claims a victim, accident takes four victims.”