Shortly after the United States entered the First World War in April 1917, Dr. Rosalie Slaughter Morton of Virginia published an article describing the work of Scottish Women’s Hospitals, a medical unit staffed entirely by female physicians who were caring for wounded servicemen among the Allied nations. Morton hoped this agency would serve as a model for treatment of American soldiers overseas. Like the infamous “Battalion of Death” — an all-female unit of Russian women soldiers created after the February revolution to shame men into enlisting — the medical women of Europe were “making a stand no less soldierly and grim against the ghastly specters of injury, disease, ravage and starvation which throng upon the heels of war.”Morton appealed to the American public for funds to support a “Battalion of Life” — the American Women’s Hospitals. This unit would be staffed by American women physicians, who felt it was their patriotic duty to ensure that American soldiers were “cared for in American hospitals, under the Stars and Stripes of the United States of America's Comfort". The American Red Cross initially refused to support AWH because “the ideals of the American medical woman’s organization were parallel to those of the Scottish Women’s Hospitals.” That is, both groups supported women’s suffrage and aimed to use wartime medical service to advance the cause of women’s political equality. Morton assured the Red Cross that she and her colleagues were “‘not interested in any [feminist] propaganda; that we stood purely for war-service for the relief of suffering.’”5In February 1918, the Red Cross finally allowed the AWH to set up its first hospital in Luzancy, France, which gave women physicians the opportunity to provide medical care to civilians and members of the military without having to place themselves under the direct authority of men from either the U.S. or French armed forces.6 The AWH also agreed to provide medical and surgical services for the communities being aided by the American Committee for Devastated France (ACDF), a civilian relief organization created by Anne Murray Dike and Ann Morgan, the youngest daughter of financier J. Pierpont Morgan.7In a letter to her mother, Anne Morgan described the horrendous conditions of the region: “The sanitary conditions are beyond words as there are still so many bodies of men and horses that are barely below the surface of the ground.” Morgan also described the brave efforts of the AWH physicians who struggled to offer basic medical care under the most stressful of circumstances.

Very Good

25 x 19 in