American nurses in Europe

Abstract

Introduction: American nurses and the war in Europe Some nurse writers focused determinedly on the positive elements of military nursing, emphasising their own roles as effective humanitarian workers providing a highly professional service. Among these were Julia Stimson, a senior US nurse, and Helen Dore Boylston, a sister with the Harvard Unit. Yet the decision of such nurses to engage in the war ran counter to a powerful strain of pacifism in the writings of others. In August 1915, when Britain had been at war for a year, a BJN editorial commented on the pacifist sentiments of prominent American nurse Lavinia Dock. The article was probably authored by the journal's editor, Ethel Gordon Fenwick, a close friend of Dock's. The two women had been instrumental in the foundation of the International Council of Nurses sixteen years earlier. 1 Fenwick was firmly committed to the allied war effort; Dock, who was head of the American Journal of Nursing's 'Foreign Department' , was unequivocally opposed to it. Nevertheless, Fenwick decided to publish 'the beautiful human ideals of this noble and lovable little woman': 2 We have been asked why we do not record events happening in connection with the European War. So it may be time for us to remark that the Foreign Department, at any rate, intends to boycott this particular war. The only mention it will draw from us will be denunciation of 'war' as a specimen of man's stupidity. This war will get no advertising, no 'write ups' , from the secretary of the International Council. It is a colossal piece of atavism-of return to the age of the tiger and the ape. 3