NURSE EDITH CAVELL: SAVING LIVES ONE WAY OR ANOTHER

By Mary Davis

“Someday, somehow, I am going to do something useful, something for people. They are, most of them, so helpless, so hurt, so unhappy.” ~Edith Cavell

Born Edith Louise Cavell on December 4, 1865 in Swardeston, England where her father was a vicar for forty-five years. After a regular education, she became a governess for various families and served as a governess in Brussels, Belgium from 1890 to 1895. When her father fell seriously ill, she went home to nurse him back to health. In helping her father, she discovered her passion for nursing. At age thirty, she applied to become a nurse probationer at the London Hospital.

She worked in several different hospitals in England. Then as a private traveling nurse, she treated individuals in their homes in villages across England. Her patients’ ailments included gout, eye afflictions, appendicitis, pneumonia, pleurisy, and cancer, among others, giving her a wide range of experience. When typhoid broke out in 1897 in Maidstone, Cavell was sent to help. For her work there, she and others were awarded the Maidstone Medal.

In 1906, she took a temporary post at a private nursing institution. Later that year, Dr. Antoine Depage recruited her to be matron at a newly established nursing school in Brussels. By 1910, Cavell launched a nursing journal in Belgium. Within a year, she was training nurses for three hospitals and dozens of schools.

When World War I broke out, Cavell had been visiting her widowed mother. Instead of remaining in England, she returned to Brussels, where she knew her skills would be badly needed. Her clinic and nursing school had been taken over by the Red Cross. Cavell was firm with her nurses that they were to attend to everyone in their care equally regardless of their nationality. The Germans advanced and, in November 1914, Brussels fell. Sixty English nurses returned home, but Cavell and her assistant remained.

Two British soldiers managed to make their way to the hospital. Cavell hid them for two weeks before helping them get to neutral Netherlands. As other British, Belgium, and French soldiers made their way to the hospital, Cavell aided them in safe passage to the Netherlands, as well as French and Belgium civilians of military age. This scheme had been devised by Prince and Princess de Croÿ of Belgium (brother and sister). The escapees were given money, papers, and guides to get them to safety over the Dutch border.

“I can’t stop while there are lives to be saved.” ~Edith Cavell

Cavell helped about 200 Allied soldiers over the course of a year, until August 3, 1915 when she and several others were arrested for harboring Allied soldiers. Confined in Saint-Gilles prison for ten weeks, she spent the last two in solitary confinement. She was tried and found guilty of treason.

Ordinarily, medical personnel were protected under the First Geneva Convention. However, if that position was used for any belligerent action the protection was forfeited. According to German military law, this type of action was punishable by death.

On October 7, 1915, Cavell and the others were brought before a court-martial. Cavell herself signed a confession of her actions on October 9 and was sentenced to death. She knew from the onset of her actions that this would be the outcome if caught, and yet she chose to offer aide anyway.

Due to the provisions of the First Geneva Convention, Britain was powerless to do anything to help her. However, the United States had not yet joined the war and tried to put diplomatic pressure on Germany to spare her life. Spain also tried to gain her a reprieve, to no avail.

Chaplain Reverend Horace Gahan met with her the day before her execution. She told him she had come to peace with her actions and fate, and held no resentments. She spoke these words to him on the eve before her execution.

“I am thankful to have had these ten weeks of quiet to get ready. Now I have had them and have been kindly treated here. I expected my sentence and I believe it was just. Standing as I do in view of God and Eternity, I realise that patriotism is not enough, I must have no hatred or bitterness towards anyone.” ~Edith Cavell

Cavell and one other in the group arrested were put to death by firing squad. Others, including Princess de Croÿ, were held in prison. Cavell was forty-nine.

A shock wave raced around the world at the news of her death, and it united people in pride and grief. It also sharply increased anti-German sentiment. The Allies refused to let her death be in vain and used it in propaganda.

The first films about Cavell and her execution were in 1916, followed by more films, plays, and television shows decade after decade. Songs and an opera were written in her honor as well. She had monuments and statues dedicated to her.

After the war, her body was transported from Belgium to England where the King granted special permission for her to be buried on the grounds of Norwich Cathedral.

At the time, Britain denied Cavell was involved in any kind of espionage. However, in recent years, a former head of MI6 revealed new evidence that strongly suggests Cavell had assisted in smuggling information as well as soldiers.

I marvel at individuals like Edith Cavell, who risk their lives for strangers. For my children, grandchildren, family and loved ones, I could see myself doing this, but I don’t know if I’m brave enough or strong enough to do that for strangers.

“Greater love hath no man than this, that a man to lay down his life for his friends.” John 15:13

I can see why, two months later, the parents of Edith Piaf (my May post) named their daughter after this brave martyr. World War I was raging, and Edith Cavell’s death was fresh on everyone’s mind.
 

MRS. WITHERSPOON GOES TO WAR (Heroines of WWII series)

A WASP (Women Airforce Service Pilots) flies a secret mission to rescue three soldiers held captive in Cuba.

Margaret “Peggy” Witherspoon is a thirty-four-year-old widow, mother of two daughters, an excellent pilot, and very patriotic. She joins the WASP. As she performs various tasks like ferry aircraft, transporting cargo, and being an airplane mechanic, she meets and develops feelings for her supervisor Army Air Corp Major Howie Berg. When Peggy learns of U.S. soldiers being held captive in Cuba, she, Major Berg, and two fellow WASPs devise an unsanctioned mission to rescue them. With Cuba being an ally in the war, they must be careful not to ignite an international incident.

Get it HERE!

 

MARY DAVIS, bestselling, award-winning novelist, has over thirty titles in both historical and contemporary themes. Her latest Quilting Circle release is THE DÉBUTANTE'S SECRET (The Quilting Circle  4), THE DAMSEL’S INTENT (The Quilting Circle  3) is a Selah Award Winner. Some of her other recent titles include; THE WIDOW'S PLIGHT (The Quilting Circle  1), THE DAUGHTER'S PREDICAMENT (The Quilting Circle  2), “Zola’s Cross-Country Adventure” in The MISSAdventure Brides Collection , Prodigal Daughters Amish series, and "Bygones" in Thimbles and Threads. COMING IN OCTOBER 2022 THE LADY'S MISSION (The Quilting Circle  5).

Mary lives in the Pacific Northwest with her husband of thirty-seven years and one cat. She has three adult children and three incredibly adorable grandchildren.

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Sources:
https://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/HistoryofBritain/Edith-Cavell/
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Edith-Cavell
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edith_Cavell
https://www.azquotes.com/author/21237-Edith_Cavell
https://www.theguardian.com/science/the-h-word/2015/oct/12/edith-cavell-nurse-martyr-and-spy

Nursing in the 1860’s – with giveaway -- By Donna Schlachter

Often, when we think back to medicine in history, leeches and bleeding comes to mind. And while those techniques were used for centuries, we do see great strides made and progress in surgeries and the understanding of how the human body works.

One of the major reasons for advancements in medicine in general, and nursing in particular, was the American Civil War. Hundreds of thousands of men died in combat, but more died on the operating tables and in the field hospitals that popped up near every battle, major and minor.

Often, the only answer to the catastrophic injuries sustained on the battlefield was amputation. Nurses were often soldiers pressed into service to hold the patient down, or to administer chloroform directly from a bloodied rag that had been used for a dozen patients or more prior. Camp followers, accustomed to cooking meals and doing laundry, were often asked to carry damaged and diseased appendages outside the camp and burn them.

Florence Nightingale and Clara Barton, highly trained nurses themselves, were appalled with this situation, and resolved to make changes. After the war ended and the country entered into an uneasy truce with itself, they petitioned government to set up training schools for young women to learn anatomy, biology, physiology, and pharmacology.

However, in the uneasy years immediately after the war, when nurses were still needed to care for those recovering from their wounds, as well as to offer assistance in hospitals and medical practices, others set up shorter-term training schools which trained nurses in the rudiments of medicine, encouraging them to spend extra-curricular hours of learning and apprenticeship under trained doctors, to graduate and send them out into the cities and towns where they were sorely needed.

Many industrious young women, or older spinsters and widows, undertook this rigorous training. These informal schools filled the gap until the longer, more formalized schools admitted students in the late 1860’s and early 1870’s.

By this time, the Lister method of sanitary surgery, which included sterilizing instruments and sanitizing the patient, the doctor and attending staff, and the operating theater, were much in discussion. While American doctors initially decried the extra work, it soon became apparent that their mortality rate was much higher, and the time spent fighting infection soon convinced them to adopt the method.

Research into breathing issues such as asthma was also generating alternatives. While initially the cause of asthma was thought to be excess exercise or cold air, studies soon proved there were other causes, including allergies. Several new treatment options were adopted, including the guarded use of belladonna, and strong coffee, both of which proved successful in many cases.

Nurses were often employed in small communities that did not require the services or could not support a full-time doctor. They carried basic instruments, common medicines, and could as easily deliver a child as remove tonsils or pull a tooth.

While the role of nurses has changed a great deal since then, no doubt there are many who would never have survived without the basic medical skills taught these brave women in our history.

Leave a comment and be entered into a drawing for an eBook version of A Nurse for Caleb, as a special pre-release gift.





Resources:

Two Centuries of American Medicine: 1776-1976—Bordley and Harvey

On the Pathology of Asthma—Dr. Henry Salter

About A Nurse for Caleb (releases September 3, 2020):

In 1868, Tessa, a Mennonite nurse graduates from nursing school and is assigned to the Amana Colonies in Iowa because of her expertise in treating asthma and other breathing problems. As a former student at a women's medical school, she knows more than most about respiratory diseases. She's also had her fair share of heartbreak when, upon her mentor's death, she was forced to abandon her dream of becoming a doctor. Will she be able to use her skills? Or will her gender keep her from helping those who truly need her?

Seth, a widower in Amana, is still nursing a broken heart from his sweetheart's passing two years before. Now raising their invalid son Seth on his own, he wonders why God didn't listen to his prayers for healing for his family. Caleb has been afflicted with the same form of asthma that killed Anna, and Seth stands by helplessly as his son fades away. Can he trust God and trust medicine, or is faith in one mutually exclusive of faith in the other?


About Donna:

Donna writes historical suspense under her own name, and contemporary suspense under her alter ego of Leeann Betts, and has been published more than 30 times in novellas, full-length novels, and non-fiction books. She is a member of ACFW, Writers on the Rock, SinC, Pikes Peak Writers, and CAN; facilitates a critique group; teaches writing classes; ghostwrites; edits; and judges in writing contests. www.HiStoryThruTheAges.com

The United States Cadet Nurse Corps

By Marilyn Turk

In the sequel I'm writing to my book The Gilded Curse, my main character is a nursing student in 1942. During my research for her role, I discovered an entity that was created especially for that period in our history, and I want to share that information with you.

Nurses were already in short supply when the United States entered World War II.

In July 1940 as war loomed over the country, the Nursing Council for National Defense was formed to investigate the status of nurses in America. The Council surveyed nursing resources and schools throughout the nation and determined that 100,000 nurses were eligible for military service, but they also found most nursing schools were ill-equipped to expand. In response, the organization urged the federal government to appropriate public funds to support nursing education.

As a result, the federal government partially funded the education of 12,000 students at 309 nursing schools in 1941 and 1942. The need for additional federal aid for the recruitment of nurses became apparent when 2500 new nurses were requested by the U.S. Army and Navy each month during 1943.

Representative Francis P. Bolton of Ohio, an advocate of nursing, introduced a bill to "provide for the training of nurses for the armed forces, government and civilian hospitals, health agencies, and war industries through grants to the institutions providing the training". The nurses would be a uniformed body, with no discrimination against race, creed, or color. The Nurse Training Act, also called the Bolton Act, was passed unanimously by Congress on June 15, 1943. The new program was named the Cadet Nurse Corps.

The Cadet Nurse Corps was open to all women between the ages of 17 and 35, in good health, who had graduated from an accredited high school. Marriage was permissible subject to guidelines. Successful applicants were eligible for a government subsidy, which paid for tuition, books, uniforms, and a living stipend. In exchange, student cadets were required to pledge to actively serve in essential civilian or federal government services for the duration of World War II. The program changed the length of nurse training from the traditional 36-months to an accelerated 30-month program.

An aggressive recruitment program ensued targeting primarily high school graduates, but college girls were also recruited. The program’s selling point was that cadets would obtain free education in a proud profession and provide an essential service to their country. Appeals to join the Corps reached millions of newspaper and magazine readers, billboard viewers, radio listeners, and movie patrons around the country.

For example, Eastman Kodak sponsored a full-page advertisement in Life magazine touting the U.S. Cadet Nurse Corps as a way to serve the country in a war job with a future. The ad suggested that young women who could qualify as Cadet Nurses were lucky girls in many different ways, with the opportunity to wear smart-looking uniforms – one for summer and another for winter.

Following the surrender of Japan in August 1945, President Harry Truman set October 5, 1945, as the final date for new student admissions to the program. At the time, 116,498 students were still in training and 3,000 more were admitted for the fall and final term. Student nurses were providing 80% of the country's nursing care in more than 1,000 civilian hospitals.

In a January, 1945, speech before the House Committee on Military Affairs, Surgeon General Thomas Parran, Jr., said, "In my opinion, the country has received and increasingly will receive substantial returns on this investment. We cannot measure what the loss to the country would have been if civilian nursing service had collapsed, any more than we could measure the cost of failure at the Normandy beachheads."

Do you know someone who participated in the Cadet Nurse Corp?

Leave a comment and your email if you'd like to receive a free copy of Shadow of the Curse when it comes out next year!

Marilyn Turk loves to study history, especially that of lighthouses and the coast of the United States. She is the author of Rebel Light, a Civil War love story set on the coast of Florida, A Gilded Curse, a historical suspense novel set on Jekyll Island, Georgia, in 1942, and Lighthouse Devotions - 52 Inspiring Lighthouse Stories, based on her popular lighthouse blog. (@ http://pathwayheart.com)

FLY GIRLS - LADY WWII PILOTS

Anne Greene here. I’ll be doing a series of postings in the next few months on the many important roles women played during World War II. Also today I have a BOOK GIVE-AWAY, so please leave a comment for a chance to win. 

In 1942, the United States faced a severe shortage of pilots. President Roosevelt decided to train women to fly military aircraft so male pilots could be released for combat overseas. Congress named the females Women Airforce Service Pilots – WASP. The ladies surprised US Army Air Force Command General, Hap Arnold, who wasn’t sure “A slip of a girl could fight the controls of a B-17 in heavy weather.”

 

More than 1,100 lady civilian volunteers flew every type of military aircraft including the B-26 and B-29 bombers as part of the WASP program. They tested overhauled crippled fighter planes, they towed targets to give ground and air gunners training to shoot with live ammunition, and they ferried untested planes from factories to military bases across the country. The WASP expected to become a branch of the military. Congress never passed that bill.

WASPS weren’t granted military status until the 1970s. And now 65 years after their service, President Obama signed a bill awarding the WASP the Congressional Gold Medal. 

The women who flew had moxie and an adventurous gene. In that 1940-1944 time frame, most people had never been aboard a plane much less flown one. Short, tall, slim, wide, women came to the WASP program knowing how to fly. Since flying lessons were expensive, most women came from wealthy families. The military trained male pilots from scratch, but not the female civilian volunteers.  

Thirty-eight WASPs lost their lives serving their country. 

Jacqueline Cochran was the driving force and head of the WASP program. Jacqueline was a pioneering aviator. But the WASP program was threatened from the start and had to fight to remain in effect. Many people found the program unacceptable. Some found it hard to swallow that women could release men for combat duty and place themselves in danger. And as the war wound to an end, these voices grew louder.   

But in 1944 Commander Arnold said, “Let the record stand that women can fly as well as men, and in some cases better.” 

 

Yet, as the war seemed to draw to a close in the summer of 1944, flight training programs closed. Instructors didn’t want to lose their jobs to women, so they lobbied for the WASPs jobs saying “It’s unacceptable for women to replace men.” Men said they were heads of families and sole providers and as such needed the jobs more than women. 

My book, ANGEL WITH STEEL WINGS, about WASPs releases soon. In it you’ll discover a tumultuous romance, live though many of the adventures real American women experienced, and find the answer to what happened to the WASPs. I hold WASPs in extremely high regard! 

In coming months I’ll also be posting about the WAC, the NURSE, the WAVE, and the SPY, all brave American women who served America during the war to end all wars. So make a note to visit with me at Heroes, Heroines, and History every 14^th day of every month. Some months I’ll have chances for give-aways to the lovely people who leave comments.  

This month I’m giving an autographed copy of my historical romance, MARRIAGE BY ARRANGEMENT, to a person who leaves a comment. I pick a commenter’s name from a hat. So tell me, Did you have a female relative, Grand-mother, aunt, cousin, third cousin twice removed who served in the military during World War II? Leave a comment even if you didn’t. A donut dolly, a victory garden grower, or a bond seller all filled needed niches during the war. These deserve comments as well.

 

BIO: ANNE GREENE delights in writing about alpha heroes who aren’t afraid to fall on their knees in prayer, and about gutsy heroines. She and her hero husband, Army Special Forces Colonel Larry Greene, visited Scotland, resulting in her award-winning Scottish historicals, Masquerade Marriage and Marriage By Arrangement. Moody Press published her first book, Trail of Tears, an American historical. A Texas Christmas Mystery also won awards. Elk Lake Publishing contracted two series. Her Women of Courage Series spotlights heroic women of World War II. The first book of the second series, Holly Garden, PI, Red Is For Rookie, releases in 2015. Anne makes her home in McKinney, Texas. Two of her four children live nearby. Tim LaHaye led her to the Lord when she was twenty-one, and Chuck Swindoll is her Pastor. Her highest hope is that her stories transport the reader to an awesome new world and touch hearts to seek a deeper spiritual relationship with the Lord Jesus. To learn more of Anne, visit her at http://www.AnneGreeneAuthor.com.  She writes a novel teaching class on her blog www.anneswritingupdates.blogspot.com