On War
“I personally abhor war and all its paraphernalia … I deplore the waste, the destruction of life and property and the shattering of our ideas of peace and love … Yet we are now engaged in war. We are dealing with conditions, not causes, and much as we dislike it, we must as individuals and as a nation meet these conditions and deal with them efficiently.”
“As I stand facing you tonight, sister nurses, under the shadow of war, we know not what we as nurses shall be called upon to give. We know, however, that our Red Cross Nursing Service exists for but one purpose – the reserve of the Army and Navy Nurse Corps in time of war. We shall be called upon to give fully, to make personal sacrifices. It must be written upon the pages of history for all time that Red Cross nurses were prepared, that in this war our soldiers were not neglected and that they were properly nursed.”
On Nursing, Midwifery
“There are moments when I wonder whether we can stem the tide and control the hysterical desire on the part of thousands, literally thousands, to get into nursing … The most vital thing in the life of our profession is the protection of the use of the word nurse.”
“Our spirit of citizenship is at last stirred, the pitiful cry of the neglected infant has, at last, touched our hearts, and it is for this reason that we urge the education of women, whether as the midwife pure and simple, or as a further development of the nurses’ work, in the practice of normal midwifery, not as a means of livelihood … but fundamentally as a protection to the strength and health and wealth of the nation.”
“What natural qualifications must the girl who would study nursing have? Well – in the first place I should tell her that it is a very lonely life, very lonely … If she wants to go on I would ask her if she could live weeks without ever thinking in terms of herself and her family. Next I’d like to know something of her attitude of mind – how serious it is. And she must have administrative ability.”
On Suffrage
“We have been told that ‘when women really want suffrage, they will get it.’ The same thing has been said about nursing laws, that ‘when nurses really want good nursing laws, they will get them.’ But we might as well face the fact that we will never get good nursing laws, proper recognition or good schools of nursing until we stand together, shoulder to shoulder.”
On the Mississippi Flood of 1927
“Refugees had been streaming into the camps – and at the peak of the disaster the Red Cross was maintaining 138 camps with a population of 600,000 homeless – as fast as the levees broke inundating homes and farmlands. Each boatload increased the burden which the nurses carried … literally tons of quinine were administered in an effort to prevent malaria and thousands were inoculated daily against smallpox and typhoid with the result that a possible, serious epidemic was forestalled … Nurses were assigned to camps and in addition frequently went from house to house in boats, caring for those who were marooned on second and third stories. One nurse went her rounds in hip boots! Another reported that she wore out her hypodermic needles during the rush of inoculations and not being able to secure more, immediately, kept her eyes alert for the first grindstone that appeared above the water, salvaged it, and sharpened them to continue her work. Alone, they presided at childbirths on levees and in box cars.”
On Florence Nightingale
“Two thousand years ago, a man gave the world a message of mercy, indulgence and love, but it remained for a woman born 102 years ago to give the practical application of those principles to suffering humanity.”
On Military Rank for Nurses
“Whom the gods reward they first make work. Experience is a good teacher. She instructs us that rank is essential to the most efficient functioning of the Army Nurse Corps, not only, but to the dignity of our womanhood.”