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A Farewell to Arms, one of the most powerful novels
by Nobel Prize-winning author Ernest Hemingway, is a
love story about a nurse and an ambulance driver set
during World War I. Hemingway also portrayed a nurse
in two short stories, "The Snows of Kilimanjaro"
and "A Very Short Story." The fictionalized
nurse in all of these was based on a real person, Agnes
Hannah von Kurowsky, RN (1892-1984), who met Hemingway
while he was a patient in a Red Cross Hospital in Milan,
Italy.
Kurowsky received her nursing training at Bellevue
Hospital in New York City, worked for a time at Long
Island Hospital and after the United States entered
World War I, enlisted as a Red Cross nurse. At that
time, nurses who worked with the military served under
Red Cross auspices. She was sent to a Red Cross Hospital
in Milan, where Hemingway became one of her patients.
Another of her patients, Henry Serrano Villard, was
also a writer who, after her death, discovered and edited
her diary.
In a letter to Hemingway included in her edited diary,
she reports that in spite of the long hours and the
poor conditions in which she worked, she felt happy
because she felt she was doing "really worthwhile
work."
After the war ended, Kurowsky was transferred to Torrel
di Mosto, where she nursed orphaned children who had
been injured by the explosion of leftover bombs. Many
of her patients also had typhoid. She returned to the
United States to work at Bellevue Hospital, but after
a six-month stint volunteered to be a Red Cross nurse
in Russia. However, nurses were advised not to go to
Russia, and the Red Cross sent her to Romania, where
she added Romanian to the languages she knew and could
speak. After completing her term she traveled widely
in Europe before returning to the United States, where
she worked as a private duty nurse.
In 1926, she again enlisted as a Red Cross nurse to
work in Haiti, then under American military government,
where her ability to speak French made her particularly
valuable. In 1931, she returned to the United States,
where she worked at a tuberculosis sanitarium in Otisville,
N.Y.
While in Haiti, she was married for a brief time, but
after her return to the United States, she met William
Stanfield, a widower with three children. She married
him in 1935, left nursing and moved to Virginia Beach
to help her husband run a motel. The marriage lasted
until her death in 1984.
Because of her "gallant and commendable services"
with the American Red Cross, she was buried at Arlington
National Cemetery.
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