THE MEDICAL HISTORY OF WW1 

Nursing Documents

Publication of collected letters were often used to generate funding for support of overseas hospitals during the war. Both of the collections reproduced here were published for this purpose.


Thanks are due to Karen Mercedes for forwarding the text of "Mademoiselle Miss".


EXTRACTS FROM LETTERS

"Nurse Helen Fairchild, My Aunt, My Hero":

An article written by Nurse Fairchild's niece containing selections from her aunt's letters home while she was serving at a Casualty Clearing Station before and during the Battle of Passchendaele. Nurse Fairchild died tragically in January 1918. This article was reprinted by kind permission of the author, Mrs Fairchild Rote ©.


Lucy Veronica Thompson RN,

We are grateful to Mrs Liz Randall who has made available original documents concerning her grandmother, Lucy Veronica Thompson, who joined the US Army Nursing Corps in 1918 and who was taken ill in 1919 during the influenza epidemic. She was eventually required to resign her army commission after she married on the 3rd September 1921.


Nursing Regulations

Volunteer Aid Detachment (VAD) Regulations Governing the Employment of Nursing V.A.D. Members in Military Hospitals.

Prepared and donated by Nancy Gaynor.


Nursing Equipment

List of equipment required for volunteer German Red Cross Nurses in 1913.

Translated by courtesy of Suzanne Fischer.

List of equipment required for British Volunteer Aid Detachment Nurse (VAD)

Prepared and donated by Nancy Gaynor, the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. The list was accompanied by a letter from the Commandant, with a prayer written on the back of the letter.

Uniform Requirements for the US Navy Nursing Corps, 1917

This list of the uniform requirements of the US Navy Nursing Corps is reprinted by permission of the Department of the Navy, Naval Historical Center, Washington Navy Yard, WASHINGTON DC 20374 - 5060

Link to "Wide Neighborhoods" by Mary Breckenridge. This is the story of a woman of vision with sound practical sense. Nothing in Mary Breckinridge's origins or upbringing would have led one to guess that she would become one of the great nurses in history, to follow in the footsteps of Florence Nightingale and Clara Barton. Her great achievements lay in introducing into the United States the concept of the trained nurse-midwife, modeled on those of the British Isles, and in establishing a demonstration project of complete family health care in a remote rural area through the organization which she founded in 1925 and directed until her death in 1965---the Frontier Nursing Service.


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