Agnes Hannah von Kurowsky

July 19, 2002

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.