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Army Nurse Corps Home > Dr. Anita Newcomb McGee: Founder of the Army Nurse Corps

Special Issue, History and Manual of the Army Nurse CorpsTHE ARMY MEDICAL BULLETIN, NUMBER 41, 1 OCTOBER 1937

Dr. Anita Newcomb McGee was born at Washington, D. C., on November 4, 1864,daughter of Professor and Mrs. Simon Newcomb. She was educated in theprivate schools of her native city going later on to Europe, where she tookprivate courses at Newham College, England, and in Geneva, Switzerland. Three years thus passed in study. After her return she married, in1888, Professor W. J. McGee, a scientist in charge of the Bureau of AmericanEthnology. Mrs. McGee took up the study of her profession in the MedicalDepartment of Columbian University, Washington, taking her degree in 1892,and supplementing this with a post graduate course in gynecology at JohnsHopkins University. She afterwards built up a large practice in herown city.

At the outbreak of the Spanish-American War in 1898, the office of The SurgeonGeneral of the United States Army was deluged with applications from allsorts and conditions of women, offering their services as nurses to the sickand wounded in camp, field and hospital. In the tremendous rush ofwork suddenly thrust on this bureau, which it was wholly unprepared to meet,it was impossible to do other than acknowledge these applications as follows:

“Madam: In reply to your letter I am directed by The Surgeon Generalto inform you that there is no authority for the employment of nurses, norare they likely to be required, as we have a regularly organized hospitalcorps ready for this duty. Very respectfully, etc.”

Yet strange as it may seem, within a few days after the last of these letterswas sent the War Department called upon the hospital corps of the D. A. R.to send four nurses to Key West, Florida.

The clerical force of The Surgeon General’s Office was inadequate, and sowholly unfamiliar with the suitability and qualifications of applicants asto be unable to investigate and pass on their applications. Even hadthey known such work, the organization of a new activity at this busy timewas not to be thought of. It was at this critical moment thatthe genius of Dr. McGee

came to the rescue. She evolved the plan of taking the whole matterinto the hands of the D. A. R. and submitted it to the Surgeons General ofboth the Army and the Navy, winning their instant approval and gratitude;and eventually gaining for herself the unique distinction of being the onlyfemale acting assistant surgeon in the United States Army at this time.

It takes genius to break new roads, to show the work-a-day world new paths. It is a little less than the same God-given attribute that sees an opportunityand seizes it at exactly the right moment. It was this that Dr. McGeedid. No better account of how she did it and what was accomplishedthereby can be given than that found in her own reports to the D. A. R.,June and September 1898. At the time of the first report, June 28,1898, the work was in its infancy.

“At the April meeting of the National Board of the Daughters the questionof what the Daughters should do in the war was naturally prominent. I had the honor at that time of presenting the plan for a hospital corps,which as originally conceived was in the form of a body of trained nurseswho should be ready to answer a call from The Surgeon General for servicein the army or navy and which should be thoroughly endorsed by the D. A.R. That plan was, on consultation with the officials, afterward enlargedby the proposal that we should undertake the examination of all applicationswhich were received from women for hospital positions. At that time The SurgeonGeneral had been overwhelmed with applications, which had been respondedto in a formal way and placed on file, without any means of examining intothe qualificationS of the applicants or making use of their offers of service. They therefore welcomed heartily the extended proposal made by the Daughters,and turned over to our society every application, no matter to whom originallyaddressed.

“At the outbreak of the war The Surgeon General of the Army had at his commanda corps of hospital stewards numbering nearly 800 men and assistants; theSurgeon General of the Navy had no such corps. It will be seen thatthe need of assistants in the field seems to be met by the army corps ofmen now enlarged to a war basis. In hospitals, however, the skilledassistance of trained women nurses is needed.

“This responsibility in the hands of the Daughters is, I think, quite a uniquematter. This recognition by the Government is something of which wehad every reason to be very proud indeed. I have received up to thepresent time (June 28) applications to the number of 2,500. The majorityare from untrained women who offer from patrotic motives. They havebeen sent to the President of the United States, Secretaries of War and Navy,Surgeons General, Senators, members of Congress, officials of the Treasury,all reaching ultimately the office of the Daughters. The work of examiningthese, as you can imagine, has been no easy one, especially as we began whenthere were 1,100 received, which we had to take in bulk. I am happyto say the work for the last two or three weeks has been quite up to date. I counted my mail the other day, and one envelope contained thirty applicationsfrom the War Department--in addition to that there were forty-six letters,either with applications or returned blanks or indorsements. This wassimply one mail.

“When an application is received which gives some promise of being from aperson who knows something about nursing we send her a small blank. The requirements printed at the head of some of our letters are those suggestedby The Surgeon General of the Army. He specified in a general way whathe wanted. The age requirement he does not insist upon absolutely. The matter of keeping up the standard depends entirely upon the number ofapplicants and the number appointed. As long as applicants who aresuitable number by the hundreds and the appointments number by the ones,of course I feel obliged to keep rather closely to the highest requirements. The Surgeon General has given me strict injunctions that all parts of thecountry are to be represented, and naturally those who have had yellow feverare preferred for Southern hospitals. In selecting applicants my rulehas been to take those who have in the first place come well indorsed, andwhose hospital records are good. Then I prefer those who have the indorsementfrom Daughters who know them. Then those recommended by the schools fromwhich they graduated, and I have established a regular method of writingto the superintendents of every school to get all possible information.

“Of course it is impossible at the present time to make any statement asto how many will be called or where they will go, and

I am therefore unable to state whether any particular applicant is acceptedor not. I cannot decide until the call comes; then I look over alland select according to the fullest knowledge I have at the time”.

Thus wrote this indefatigable woman, at the time when the real rush of thework was still before her. Hear her once more, in September of thesame year:

“The D. A. R. hospital corps has the honor to report that its work has grownand multiplied to an extent far beyond what was considered probable. The first nurses sent were viewed in the light of an experiment, and muchdepended on the record which they should make. To the lasting gratification,not only to the D. A. R., but of womenkind in general, we are proud to recordthat the nurses whom we first selected proved themselves fully worthy ofthe trust imposed on them, and fit co-workers with the brave men whose namesare entered on the roll of honor of the army. The inevitable results of theirnoble work was the ever increasing demand from army hospitals for trainedwomen nurses, and the decision which has now been reached on every hand,that satisfactory hospital work, without such nurses, is almost impossible. Some fifty times has The Surgeon General of the Army called on the D. A.R. hospital corps to designate suitable nurses for some specified duty, andthese calls, originally for about half a dozen persons each time, increasedto as many as 150 nurses in a single order. The total number thus appointedis in the neighborhood of 1,000 nurses—a regiment of women. As is alreadyknown to you, all applications from women addressed to the War Departmentwere forwarded to us for examination, and all but the earliest received atthe Navy Department were also forwarded. In addition to these, hostsof applicants wrote or applied in person to us until the total number weexamined rose to about 4,600. Realizing, as we fully did, that therewas a great principle at stake, we exercised the greatest care in the preparationof our list of eligible women. First of all, the candidate must beof irreproachable character and suitable age. Second, she must possessgood health. Third, she must have the training which is all essentialto the successful prosecution of her work. This last requisite is onethat recent progress has made not only possible, but an absolute necessity,to secure the best results, and we feel

that the one safe policy—safe above all to the sick soldiers—was to demandactual graduation from training school.”

I have quoted at length in order that it might be clearly understood howcarefully the method of procedure had been thought out, with what infinitepains the work, though yet in its infancy, was carried on. When wetake into consideration the exigencies of the time, the sudden demand andthe urgent need, admitting of no delay, it seems scarcely less than a miraclethat so few of the nurses sent showed themselves unworthy of their high calling.

On August 29th The Surgeon General sent for Dr. McGee, offered her an appointmentas acting assistant surgeon in the United States Army, and a detail to goto New York. He asked how soon she could leave. Her reply was entirelycharacteristic: “By the next train”. The oath was administered thenand there and she was instructed to proceed at once on her journey, securethe services of thirty nurses and start them off inside of two days for PuertoRico. Within the specified time twenty-three of the nurses were ontheir way.

The Surgeon General finding the work had assumed such size and importance,suggested that Dr. McGee remove her headquarters to his office and make itin point of location, as it was in fact, a branch of his department. This was done. On September 15 there were 1,200 nurses employed in the army. The number of applicants passed upon and classified, up to the same date,reached close to 6,000.

The brilliancy of the results up to this time overshadowed the cost of theachievement, the strain—mental, physical and nervous, the discomfort anddifficulty of protracted effort in the debilitating heat of a Washingtonsummer. From early morning often till eleven o’clock at night she wasat her desk—never a word of complaint, ready for any and all the demandsmade upon her, verily this is the stuff of which heroes are made. Andhere I note, with all humiliation and chagrin, that in all this time of stress,no organized body of nurses, as such, gave any assistance worth the mentioning. Individuals came to the front and bore sometimes more than their share ofthe burden, but they planned no system of aid in other ways than as units. It appeals to us now with all the hopeless regret of a lost opportunity.

After the close of the war the number of nurses in the service was graduallyreduced, until today there are, with the “reserves” nearly 250. Theexcitement now was over, the inspiration of struggle and victory gone. Things settled down into the drudgery of daily routine, the monotony of ordinarybusiness life, all the more keenly felt because of the sharp contrast tothe days just passed. There were old records to be straightened out,order out of chaos, arranging, planning the Army Nurse Corps on a practicalbasis.

So Dr. McGee worked on, often maligned, misrepresented, and misunderstood,weary, far from well and longing to be relieved. She knew however,that the scheme was yet too imperfectly developed to trust in strange hands. Indeed there were none in which to place it. The necessity to havea woman at the head was too obvious to admit of discussion. As yetthere was no position to offer any one capable of doing the work. Thedoctor was there, an acting assistant suurgeon, the only woman holding sucha commission. What nurse was there in any way fitted for the place,who would have sacrificed to cast her lot with the Nurse Corps and its uncertainfuture? Dr. McGee did not falter or stop. S he studied out and perfectedplans, the method of selecting applicants, and still more completely systematizedthe Corps office until today it is a model one. There all that concernseach nurse who has ever served, her place of duty, change of location, efficiency,health, can be found, alphabetically “jacketed” and filed. Each hospitalhas its record, the names of nurses serving there and the dates of transferfrom one point to another. In another place can be found, under each State,alphabetically filed, all obtainable printed information concerning civilhospitals, and the training schools connected with them. Books of referencerelating to the management of the Nurse Corps in foreign armies, while filesof all the best medical and nursing journals of the world can be reachedat any moment.

The Army “Reorganization Bill” is before Congress, with a section for theNurse Corps (Sect. 19, Act of Feb. 2, 1901, Par. 31 Stat. 753), graftingit on the Medical Department of the United States Army. Provision ismade for, a Superintendent, a graduate nurse, at its head, for the appointmentof nurses under more favorable conditions than exist at present, their pay,perquisites;

in fact, everything necessary to the life and successful continuance andpermanence of the Corps. All this is pre-eminently the work of Dr. McGee. It was she who offered the solution of the difficult problem of how nursescould be a practical help in the hour of the country’s need; and, more thanthis, the plan was formulated “out of hand”, so to speak, as there was notime for mature consideration. It was she who thought out what couldbe done and did it. It was she who worked on through many months toput the Corps on a safe and lasting basis, and it was she “who being reviled,reviled not again”. It was she who, having accomplished all this, handsit over to the nursing profession.

There can be no doubt that the Nurse Corps, properly managed, has a greatfuture. Time alone can show what we, as a profession, will do with this magnificientlegacy, with all its great possibilities, which she has bequeathed to us.

It is impossible to contemplate thus the work of this remarkable woman andnot feel that she was the personification of the ‘spirit of ‘76’’, a worthydaughter of the American Revolution, “whose ancestors counted personal easeof little worth, when weighed in the balance of their country’s need”.

Comments by Dr. McGee on the Article by Dita H. Kinney:

This very flowery and rather extravagant eulogy does contain many facts. I recognized years ago that I made a great mistake in not suggesting an officialappointment at the beginning of the work, and doing the whole thing withoutreference to any organization. But. I was then Vice President Generalof the National Society of the Daughters of the American Revolution and beganthinking about the war from the point of view of the work of that organization. Had I been an army official from the start it would have, I think, preventedto some extent the attempts of women in New York and some other places toget control of nursing in the army. As you know, some nurses were misledby the newspaper publicity given the so-called Red Cross nurses, which resultedin not having army contracts, to their great regret later. I was fartoo modest in those days to seek any publicity for myself or for what I wasdoing: that was the second great mistake I made. In those days theWar Department

ment had no publicity bureaus such as it had during the World War, and likethe army in general, I simply went about my business with no thought of thepublic. However, there was a decided advantage in the D. A. R. connection; first, because I had the use of several large rooms in an office buildingto which some of the Daughters came every day to offer help. It wasthey who read letters from applicants and replied by circular letters writtenand signed by me, choosing the applicant according to whether or not theletter indicated nurse training. I know of no other way in which thispreliminary sorting could have been done had I been obliged to depend uponthe slow-working government methods and the shortage of clerks. Throughoutthe country also the help rendered by D. A. R. members was highly usefulin our work of selecting army nurses. The work, of what I then called theD. A. R. “Hospital Corps”, was strictly limited to this field, since oncethe nurse was appointed she had no further connection with the D. A. R. So I am sure that, although the D. A. R. connection was a disadvantage externally,it was a great advantage in the office.

When I wrote into the Reorganization Act (Sect. 19, Act of Feb. 2, 1901)that the nurse corps should consist of a superintendent, chief nurses, nursesand reserve nurses, I think no one had previously proposed the idea of reserveofficers, now so general. I did, in fact, issue appointments as reservenurses to a number of women with excellent army records; but the prospectof another war was so remote, the clerical force so small, that that planwas soon abandoned. And here I may mention my great surprise when theSecretary of War announced recognition of the Red Cross nursing service as“the reserve” of the army which was, of course, the correct thing for himto do; but the term did not in any way make the individual nurse enrolledwith the Red Cross a reserve nurse and member of the Army Nurse Corps asprovided in the 1901 Act. I hope my point is clear: that to name anorganization or large group of women as constituting the reserve does notcome within the scope of the law which authorizes individuals to be “reservenurses”. Instead of issuing the transfers to active service, whichwe issued in the World War, it should have been preceded, or at least accomplished,by appointments as reserve nurse. It is certainly a

late day to be calling attention to this, but the Manual causes me to writeabout it.

Mrs. Kinney refers to new conditions to be met after the passage of the ReorganizationAct. As it turned out, I have always understood that no changes weremade in the Corps except one that I had recommended to her; viz.; that appointmentas chief nurse should be made only after written examination had been held. Of course the form of appointment was changed from that of a contract tothat of a paper showing appointment by The Surgeon General, and also of coursethe military status of the Corps was acknowledged legally. Years laterI secured by Act of Congress the same military status for the original NurseCorps as that enjoyed by the later members.

I think I have not published anywhere the following interesting fact. Colonel Greenleaf, Chief Surgeon in Puerto Rico, was strongly opposed towomen nurses in the field. About the end of July (1898) he cabled arequest for male nurses. When The Surgeon General said in reply thatthere were none to be had, and should he send female nurses, the Colonelrefused the offer. A month later he cabled asking that thirty femalenurses be sent. That cable was received by The Surgeon General August29th. Of the first cable I knew nothing and was greatly surprised whenin 1899 I attended a public meeting in Baltimore during an agitation forthe passage of an absurd bill creating a Nurse Corps which would be superiorto the Medical Corps, and heard Miss Margaret Chandler argue that The SurgeonGeneral had refused to send “nurses” when Colonel Greenleaf requested them,thus proving The Surgeon General’s utter incompetence and, by implication,my own. The second cable accepting female nurses was the immediatecause of my official appointment with orders to New York that Monday, August29th, to arrange for the sailing of nurses on a transport leaving for PuertoRico Wednesday noon. Arriving in New York I found the transport bookedto capacity and it was a difficult task to put through the substitution ofnurses for other military personnel; but thirty nurses did sail. Thisis a typical example of the misunderstandings which underlaid much of thecriticism of the Medical Department at that time.

The bill mentioned above was the one which failed of passage in the Houseof Representatives and at the next session was buried in the Senate MilitaryAffairs Committee. This bill was sponsored by Mrs. Whitelaw Reid, ofNew York, and many prominent nurses who knew nothing of the army, aided bya paid lobbyist; but the prejudice against women in the army, combined withthe impracticable nature of the bill, made it easy for me to defeat it. All legislation relating to nurses was left in my hands by The Surgeon Generalduring my term of office. Some of these same nurses, years later, admittedto me their mistake. For instance, Miss Dock, when writing the historyof Red Cross nursing, consulted me on a few points and said that the experienceof the World War had shown that I was the one during the Spanish-AmericanWar time who was right and who had the vision, and that their attitude towardsthe control of army nursing had been a mistake. You see my modestyhas quite disappeared. However, in this history the story of Spanish-AmericanWar nursing is so presented as to be highly misleading.

Anita Newcomb McGee
Southern Pines, N. C.
April 28, 1937