Agnes Warner and the Nursing Sisters of the Great War Read Online Free

higher status than it possesses in the old country. It attracts, in general, the daughters of professional men, and those from comfortable households . . . It is a rule that Canadian Nursing Sisters have had, not a common, but a High School education . . . And as nurses their training has been very thorough, with fuller courses of lectures on the basal subjects than is usual in Great Britain. As a result, a remarkably large proportion of the matrons of the great hospitals in the United States are of Canadian birth and training. Add to this that the Canadian nurse embarked on her profession is paid on a scale which in Great Britain would be thought extravagant. But then she is thoroughly competent . . . [I]n this war they have abundantly “made good.”
    Adami then hastened to uphold the nurses’ humility, as if their elevation was more richly deserved because they did not demand it suffragette-style: “It should be emphasized that this step was taken . . . by the Ministry and Militia Council, not as the result of any agitation by the nursing sisters themselves — in fact, some years before the suffragettes became militant. The experience of the Canadian Army Medical Service has abundantly justified the innovation and proved it to be right and wise.”
    As lieutenants, Canadian nursing sisters could attend the entertainments hosted by other officers, enjoy relatively comfortable amenities, and claim respect and obedience from orderlies in the military hospitals. Meanwhile, the British army continued to deny rank to nurses in theQ.A.I.M.N.S., itself a non-military organization but still the chief body of nurses supporting Britain’s military. Not surprisingly, the issue of rank occasionally fuelled tension between co-working British nurses disdainful of uppity “colonials” and Canadian nurses who resented being treated as inferiors. For the most part, however, working relations between nurses of the two countries were cordial, even warm, as troubling inequalities gave way to mutual purpose.
    Some Canadian nurses even donned the uniform of the British Q.A.I.M.N.S. In September 1916, the Saint John Daily Telegraph reported that a new request for two hundred nurses for the Q.A.I.M.N.S. “will no doubt satisfy the desires of a number of trained nurses who wish to get overseas.” Sixty-six of these were to come from the Maritime provinces, and interested women applied at the Royal Victoria Hospital in Montreal. Contracts were for one year, renewable, or for the duration of the war; return passage and uniforms were provided.

    Other important routes to the front arose besides the C.A.M.C. and the Q.A.I.M.N.S. Following the Great Retreat to the River Marne in 1914, the French Army medical service ( Service de Santé Militaire ) found itself stretched far beyond what it could handle. Desperate for nursing personnel, officials reached out across the Channel for help and the French Flag Nursing Corps (F.F.N.C.) was born, a collaborative effort between the French government, two prominent nurses in Britain — Mrs. Bedford Fenwick and Miss Grace Ellison — and their supportive committee. The British ladies were determined to recruit a steady supply of British (and, by extension, Canadian) nurses for French medical hospitals who would not only provide much-needed care, but also “raise the whole tone of nursing in France.” In other words, they would rehabilitate the standards of French military nursing, which, by all British accounts, were adequate but cried for the precision, sanitation, and “cheeriness” that prevailed in British hospitals. Beginning in the latter half of 1914, approximately two hundred and fifty graduate nurses from Britain, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand who attested to being born of British parents and proficient in French signed up with the F.F.N.C., looking for a taste of the first aid experience behind French trenches. Because the French