ABSTRACT
In the 30-odd years after the Civil War, the Army forgot the medical lessons of that war, and once again assumed that the Medical Corps could handle the few casualties expected from America’s fi ght with Spain. Women nurses, it was believed, would be unable to handle primitive fi eld conditions and would give Army doctors more trouble than they were worth. Once the fi ghting started, however, it was not battle casualties that posed the problem but disease. Typhoid, malaria, and yellow fever, all of which demanded intensive nursing care if the patient was to survive, quickly overwhelmed the Army Medical Department. Army Surgeon General George Sternberg appointed socially connected Washington D.C. physician Anita Newcomb McGee to the rank of Assistant Surgeon General and placed her in charge of selecting women qualifi ed to serve as contract nurses. McGee, who was secretary of the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR), asked that organization to help her professionally vet the nurses. McGee wanted to send the Army the best trained and most morally upright women she could fi nd. She and her fellow DAR matrons collected applications, checked personal and professional references, and selected 1,500 of the best-qualifi ed nurses out of 5,000 applicants. The contracts the women signed stipulated that they work where they were assigned for a specifi ed salary until the Army dissolved the contract at its convenience. Contract nurses were sent to Army hospitals in Cuba, Florida, Georgia, Long Island, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines. The Army assigned Rose Heavren of Connecticut to Montauk Point, Long Island, with 12 other contract nurses and a group of Catholic sisters. When Heavren’s group arrived at Montauk, the colonel in charge had the 12 women line up, and called in his doctors, allowing them to pick their nurses out of the line-up. The men pointed their fi ngers and said, “I’ll take that one,” and then, “I’ll take this one,” and “well, I guess that leaves her.” Heavren’s response to the selection process was to get the giggles, leaving one doctor stuck with “the giggler.” Montauk had about 1,500 patients in any given day, said Heavren in her memoir, “running temperatures from 103 to
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106, and dying like fl ies. It was not possible to get enough supplies of any kind . . . we were always running out of medicine. We worked from 5 am to 8 at night. Breakfast was black coffee and some sort of mush, dinner was boiled cabbage and black coffee.” In letters written to her family, Heavren explained that the nurses had to pay to have their uniforms laundered, and that they also had to pay $10.00 a month out of their $30.00 a month salary to supplement their meals or they would get only half rations. Heavren was eventually sent to Havana, Cuba, where she came down with yellow fever. She recovered, returned home to her mother in Connecticut and continued her career as a nurse. Heavren’s letters are available at the Women in Military Service for America Memorial Foundation Archives in Arlington, Virginia. The Army sent nurse Helena Maria Gottschalk Arendt to Manila in the Philippines, where she was assigned to a fi eld hospital on the outskirts of town. Moro snipers fi red on the hospital from the jungle at night, forcing the staff to black out the hospital with blankets despite the tropical heat. Arendt was released from her contract when the war ended and was happy to be able to return to the U.S. Arendt’s story as well as those of numerous other Spanish American War contract nurses can be found in the memoirs of individual nurses published in DAR journals between 1900 and the start of the First World War. Several nurses who served aboard hospital transport ships during the war later joined the newly established Navy Nurse Corps. The following reminiscences are included in Doris Sterner’s In and Out of Harm’s Way: A History of the Navy Nurse Corps. Esther V. Hasson of the hospital ship Relief, who would later serve as Chief of the Navy Nurse Corps, wrote in her memoirs, “We were immensely proud of our beautiful ship. The crowning glory of the operating room on the Relief was the big x-ray machine, at that time new to medical science. After reaching Cuba, it was in constant use in cases of gunshot wounds, because it located bullets and enabled us to avoid the prolonged painful probing which so bothered patients.” Hasson distinctly remembered how upset her fever patients got when they were placed on liquid diets while others around them were eating real food. “Big men broke down and cried,” she wrote. Beatrice Von Homrigh Stevenson worked aboard the Army transport ship Lampasas. “The ship was so crowded and it was so hot that the patients were laid on the decks,” wrote Stevenson. “Their uniforms were woolen and they were miserable. We had no medicine but plenty of fresh water because the ship had its own distilling plant. So we gave the patients plenty of baths, and only lost 6 (of 130).” The contract nurses performed so well in primitive and fi eld conditions that the Army and Navy realized that it might be a good idea to have established corps of nurses ready for rapid mobilization in the event of another war. In 1901, Congress authorized the establishment of the Army Nurse Corps, and in 1908 established the Navy Nurse Corps. For the fi rst time in American history, women became offi cial, uniformed members of the U.S. Armed Forces. However, the members of the Army and Navy Nurse Corps found themselves in a peculiar position, one that wasn’t noticed until military nurses and medical corpsmen were working side by side under the battlefi eld conditions of World War I. Army and Navy Nurses held a unique position in the military – they held neither offi cer nor enlisted rank but were designated simply as nurses. As such, any authority they wielded on the wards was very much subject to question. Nurses were outside the military chain of command, and many medical corpsmen felt no compunction to obey their orders. Thus although the military expected
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their nurses to maintain order on their wards, they had no authority to do so. The military services wrestled with this question of female authority over men for several decades, and it wasn’t until World War II that female military nurses were given offi cer status commensurate with that of male military offi cers.
