Nurses were the Heroes of the Day When Spanish Flu Hit

During the first seventeen years of the 20th century, Cecil Countians lived tranquil lives, far removed from growing tensions in Europe and the terrible devastation of a deadly pandemic.  However, one group of young ladies preparing to become healthcare professionals at the end of the horse and buggy era in medicine, had their careers minted by the growing global disruptions of a world war and a lethal contagion.

Once Union Hospital opened in 1908, they hired a Canadian nurse, Maida Grace Campbell, to serve as superintendent.  The trained medical clinician managed all facilities and served as the head nurse while also supervising a small staff of aides and orderlies.  Three years after it opened, the institution decided to establish a nursing school to supply more caregivers to aid in the work.      

Young, unmarried women twenty to thirty years old with one year of high school could apply for admission.  Once accepted into the three-year program that led to a nursing diploma, students received lectures, practical experience, and room and board, along with a monthly stipend of $5.  There was no charge for tuition as the ladies exchanged their labor for the clinical experience.

Nurses Decreased as Deadly Virus Advanced

At the first commencement exercise in 1914, Alice Denver, Stella Graves, Mary King, and Georgia May Miller proudly dressed in white uniforms, received the coveted Union Hospital caps and diplomas while standing on the stage of the Elkton Opera House.

For those in this cohort and classes over the next four years, troubling, distant matters disrupted their lives.  As they advanced in their studies or started fledgling careers, war flared up in Europe — in 1917, the United States entered the conflict, fighting alongside European Allies.  As the blood spilled on the battlefield, the army needed caregivers to staff field hospitals in France, so the Surgeon General issued a call for 5,000 nurses to serve in the Army Nurse Corps. 

Several Union Hospital nurses answered the patriotic call, going off to care for the soldiers.  Superintendent Maida Campbell, R.N, resigned first.  In August 1918, she enlisted as a nurse in Canada’s Military Hospital Service.   Her brother, a member of the Canadian forces, had been killed in battle, and a second brother lost a leg in 1917.  ¹.

Within a month, additional Union Hospital graduates mobilized, at least one-fourth of the training school’s alumnae enlisting.  Adelia Monica McGready (Class of 1917), Mary Ella Alderson (1918), and Laura Tucker Story (1918) departed for military duty in September.  Allice Denver, a 1914 graduate who had taken a position at the Rockefeller Institute in New York, also volunteered for war duty in France.

These young, patriotic professionals serving the nation in wartime undoubtedly thought that these were the most distressing times they could ever confront professionally.  But as summer slipped into fall, worse suffering appeared as the pandemic swept across the nation.  The remaining nurses at Union Hospital, their ranks thinned by war mobilization, scrambled to feed patients, provide nursing care, and maintain hygiene as the wards filled with pneumonia cases when the Spanish Influenza hit Cecil County hard in September and October 1918.   The nurses worked day and night to combat the illness and relieve the suffering, each day becoming more difficult as even they were not spared in this era before vaccines and antibiotics.

Two Nurses Fell Victim to Deadly Viruses

Among those who toiled day and night, Rose Cecilia Suter, lost her life.  The 29-year-old class of 1917 graduate died at the Kelly Institute in Baltimore while working as a nurse.   Becoming ill at work, Miss Suter returned home for a couple of weeks to recover from the grippe.  But upon returning to Baltimore, the Cecil County News reported that she contracted influenza.  She was laid to rest at Immaculate Conception Cemetery. Her mother, six sisters, and a half-brother survived her. Rose’s father, Francis X, 83, had died suddenly of a heart attack earlier that year. 

Another victim of the infectious diseases of that era was Stella A. Grave (class of 1914).  While doing Red Cross Duty, She met and married Dr. Victor L. Glover.  After a wedding trip to Pen-Mar, the couple returned to Inwood, WV, where the groom practiced medicine.  There, while working in his office, she contracted Tuberculosis. 

These often-forgotten, overextended nurses were the heroes of the time as frontline clinicians, just as our overworked healthcare workers are today as they fight the coronavirus.   They faced the Spanish Influenza, their jobs being made all the more difficult by the nation’s other fight, World War I. 

For more on the Spanish Flu in Cecil County, see the Spanish Flu Archive.

For more on women as caregivers during this time see Did We Forget to Memorialize Spanish Flu Because Women Were the Heroes?

Endnotes

1. Midland Journal, Aug 16 1918[↩]