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World |
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What
do Related U.S. Army Center of Military History Air Force History Support Office Air Force Historical Research Agency |
By
Chris Schreiber World War I changed more than the way wars were fought. It also transformed the way soldiers were injured and the way nurses treated the wounded. The Great War ushered in depersonalized combat, with the introduction of new technology that made the machine gun standard issue. New strategies of trench warfare also changed the face of war, as soldiers charged hidden bunkers guarded by barbed wire, some facing gas attacks deemed so inhumane they were later banned. Healthcare advances did not keep pace with military technology. Infection and disease killed thousands who survived battlefield injuries, and the end of the conflict was marked by the influenza epidemic of 1918, which killed more people worldwide than the war itself. U.S. soldiers were cared for at home and abroad by both the Army Nurse Corps (ANC) and the Navy Nurse Corps. Even military historians don't know the exact number of nurses who served, in part because nurses were often grouped in a more general category of women in the war, but by 1918 there were 1,386 nurses in the Navy Nurse Corps. Even the secretary of the Navy during the war, Josephus Daniels, put out a much-maligned call for women, who became known as "Yoemanettes." According to the Red Cross, almost 20,000 nurses were assigned to active duty with the Army, Navy, U. S. Public Health Service, and the Red Cross overseas service, with the vast majority-almost 18,000-serving in the ANC. In addition, 1,177 nurses who were not able to undertake active overseas service were enrolled as "home defense" nurses. Many nurses worked aboard "moving hospitals," trains that could evacuate as many as 400 patients from facilities near the front lines in order to move them closer to the point of embarkation back to the United States. Helen Burrey, a reserve nurse in the Army's Base Hospital No. 27, was among the first sent to France and was on the first such train. "Each moving hospital was equipped with electric lights, steam heat, electric fans, lavatories, and even ash trays for the patients' indulgence," Burrey wrote in her journal, which was published in the Official History of the Red Cross. "We worked day and night with those patients; the pathetic condition of our boys who were very badly wounded made us realize that being wounded was hard enough to bear, without the jolts, noise, and dirt connected with traveling on a train." |
