Whenever there was a big nursing job to be done, Edith Lillian Whitmore Wenmark was the go-to gal.
She was director of nursing at Anoka State Hospital in the mid-1960s when she was offered the same position at the Sister Kenny Rehabilitation Institute in Minneapolis. After five years there, the former Swedish Hospital in Minneapolis came calling. The hospital named her its director of nursing and in 1970 drew on her leadership to engineer a merger with St. Barnabas Hospital.
That merger created Metropolitan Medical Center, a facility with 900 beds, a 50-bed mental health facility and two schools of nursing. It later became part of Hennepin County Medical Center.
"She was on the top of the list of headhunters," said her son, Bill, of Deephaven.
Wenmark, 94, of Excelsior, was visiting her daughter in Missouri when she had a brain hemorrhage and died April 4.
She was inspired to go into nursing by her mother, Lillian, one of the few nurses on the Colorado prairie, where Wenmark was born in 1915.
She arrived in Minnesota in 1942 and by 1947 had taken a position as a staff nurse at the Anoka State Hospital. There she was appointed director of nursing and was responsible for bringing a more human touch and compassionate approach to mental health care, her son said.
From 1964 to 1969, she focused her efforts on treating polio patients at Sister Kenny. She signed on as nursing director at Swedish Hospital, and in 1969 was the first nurse in the United States to be appointed by the American Nursing Association to the Joint Committee for Stroke Facilities.
