Introduction
Last December, I wrote about Elise Bergold and Mary Frances Keller, two Hicksvillians who served in the Army Nurse Corps during World War I. This month, we look back a little further, and we see that before Ms. Keller was a nurse serving in Europe in the Great War, she had been... well, a nurse serving in Europe in the Great War. While the conflict was still new, she had served on a team sent to Belgrade to establish a Red Cross Hospital, at a time when that city was bombarded daily by Austrian mortars.
The American Red Cross was founded in 1881 to provide disaster relief to communities anywhere in the world. Nurses played vital roles in its work, but it waited until 1909 to establish its own Nursing Service. That timing reflected an increased awareness that 20th-century America would need a large pool of nurses who had solid and modern training. Thanks to that awareness, when disease and war hit Europe in 1914, the Red Cross was able to assemble relief teams of surgeons and nurses to send where they were needed most.
