Tag Archives: World War I

Highlighting NYAM Women in Medical History: Emily Dunning Barringer, MD

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By Paul Theerman, Director

Academy Fellows lead by serving, now during the COVID-19 crisis as in the past. This is the sixth entry in our 2020 series on early women NYAM Fellows and their contributions to society. For earlier posts, see Sara Josephine Baker, Martha Wollstein, Daisy Maude Orleman Robinson, Sarah McNutt, and Elizabeth Martha Cushier. Please also see our biographical sketch of Mary Putnam Jacobi, the first female Fellow of the New York Academy of Medicine.

While Emily Dunning Barringer (1876–1961) shares many things in common with other early women Fellows of the Academy, she can claim one unique distinction: having her life story made into a feature film. The Girl in White—based on Barringer’s 1950 memoir, Bowery to Bellevue: The Story of New York’s First Woman Ambulance Surgeon—debuted in 1952 and starred June Allyson. In the film as in her life, Barringer overcame both institutional barriers and deliberate affronts as she pursued a career as a woman professional in an overwhelmingly male world.

June Allyson portraying Dr. Emily Dunning Barringer in the 1952 film The Girl in White. Promotional photograph from the private collection of NYAM Fellow Patricia Gallagher.

Barringer was born in 1876 to a wealthy family in Scarsdale, New York. Her parents, Edwin James Dunning and Frances Gore Lang, believed that all children, regardless of gender, should be educated and trained to support themselves. The family fell on hard financial times when Barringer was 10, and a well-meaning friend’s suggestion that perhaps the young girl should train as a milliner only served to strengthen Frances Dunning’s resolve for her daughter to receive a college education. With the support of her uncle, Henry Sage, one of the founders of Cornell University, Barringer did so, graduating from Cornell in 1897 before going on to medical school at the College of Medicine of the New York Infirmary, which merged with the new Cornell University School of Medicine during her time as a student.

The NYAM plaque honoring Barringer’s service as an ambulance surgeon in New York City hospitals.

Graduating from medical school in 1901, Barringer applied for a residency at New York City’s Gouverneur Hospital but was rejected despite receiving the second highest score on the qualifying exam. Undeterred, and with the help of Dr. Mary Putnam Jacobi, she reapplied the following year and this time was accepted, becoming the first woman to earn a position as surgical resident. Acceptance into the program, however, did not mean acceptance by other residents or their supervising physicians, and in her autobiography, Barringer recounted that she had been harassed and given the most difficult and unpleasant assignments and schedules. One difficult role, however, she sought herself, that of ambulance physician, and when she was given the position, she achieved a second “first”: the first female ambulance surgeon. Overcoming the skepticism of her male colleagues who felt that a woman would not be able to withstand the physical challenges of the role, she went on to earn not only their respect, but also the respect of city firefighters, police officers, and the patients she treated in Manhattan’s Lower East Side tenements.

She fell in love with fellow doctor Ben Barringer during her residency, and they married in 1904 when her residency ended. She immediately experienced frustration because her opportunities for work and further training were so much more constrained than her new husband’s. The pair lived for a short time in Vienna where both attended class, and then returned to New York City. Barringer took a position on the gynecological staff at New York Polyclinic Hospital and worked as an attending surgeon at the New York Infirmary for Women and Children, where she specialized in the study of venereal diseases.

Poster for the 1952 MGM film The Girl in White. From the private collection of NYAM Fellow Patricia Gallagher.

During World War I Barringer served as vice chair of the American Women’s Hospitals War Service Committee of the National Medical Women’s Association (later the American Medical Women’s Association). In that role, she spearheaded a campaign to raise money for the purchase of ambulances to be sent to Europe. When the war ended, she became an attending surgeon at Brooklyn’s Kingston Avenue Hospital and subsequently its director of gynecology. She was a member of the American Medical Association and a fellow of the American College of Surgeons and The New York Academy of Medicine. In 1941 Barringer was elected president of the American Medical Women’s Association (AMWA).

Over the course of her long medical career, Barringer advocated for legislation that would control the spread of venereal disease and authored numerous articles on gynecology. As Chair of the Special Committee of the American Medical Women’s Association, Barringer was decorated by the King of Serbia for championing the service of female physicians during World War I. As co-chair of the War Service Committee, she helped to organize the American Women’s Hospital in Europe, which provided medical and surgical care during the war and postwar reconstruction. During World War II, Barringer successfully lobbied Congress to allow women physicians (who had been allowed to work only as contract physicians and were consequently denied the benefits earned by their male counterparts) to serve as commissioned officers in the medical corps of the Army and Navy.

After World War II, Emily Barringer and her husband retired to Connecticut. She died there in 1961.

_____

References

Changing the Face of Medicine: Dr. Emily Dunning Barringer; National Library of Medicine. https://cfmedicine.nlm.nih.gov/physicians/biography_23.html. Accessed November 10, 2020.

Women Physicians in WWII: Dr. Emily Dunning Barringer; American Medical Women’s Association. https://www.amwa-doc.org/wwibios/dr-emily-dunning-barringer/. Accessed November 10, 2020.

Dr. Emily Dunning Barringer; Connecticut Women’s Hall of Fame. https://www.cwhf.org/inductees/emily-barringer. Accessed November 10, 2020.

Women in Medicine: Dr. Emily Dunning Barringer; Mental Floss. https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/63610/women-medicine-dr-emily-dunning-barringer. Accessed November 10, 2020.

Highlighting NYAM Women in Medical History: Elizabeth Martha Cushier, MD

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By Arlene Shaner, Historical Collections Librarian

Academy Fellows lead by serving, now during the COVID-19 crisis as in the past. This is the fifth entry in our series on early women NYAM Fellows and their contributions to society; for earlier posts, see Sara Josephine Baker, Martha Wollstein, Daisy Maude Orleman Robinson, and Sarah McNutt. Please also see our biographical sketch of Mary Putnam Jacobi, the first female Fellow of the New York Academy of Medicine.

When Elizabeth Cushier (1837–1931) was elected a Fellow of the New York Academy of Medicine in 1889, she was only the third woman to be invited into the Academy, joining two of her colleagues from the New York Infirmary for Women and Children, Dr. Mary Putnam Jacobi and Dr. Sarah McNutt.

Cushier was born in Jamaica, New York, on November 25, 1837, a daughter of John Henry and Martha Lumley Cushier. She was the sixth of eleven children, but three of her older siblings had died before she was born; five other younger siblings followed. In her autobiography, published as an appendix to Kate Campbell Hurd-Mead’s Medical Women of America, Cushier said this about her childhood: “We were brought up in the strictest economy, as my father’s income was a very limited one, but we were, as I remember, a happy, healthy lot, quite enterprising and consequently often trying.”[i] When she was sixteen, the family moved to Little Falls, New Jersey. Cushier quickly became friendly with the Hinton family, who had also relocated from New York, and forged a life-long friendship with Ione Hinton. The family’s wide-ranging intellectual interests, along with their support of abolitionism and women’s suffrage, resonated with her and encouraged her independent spirit.

After her mother died in 1859, Cushier took on much of the household responsibility, caring for her father and her four living younger siblings. His remarriage a year later freed her to go to New York, where she got a position singing with a church choir and gave private voice lessons. In the summer of 1868, she happened to read a medical article that sparked her interest, and she enrolled in the homeopathic New York Medical College for Women before transferring a year later to Elizabeth and Emily Blackwell’s Woman’s Medical College of the New York Infirmary, graduating in 1872.

Cushier’s 1872 graduation noted in the Annual Announcement of the Woman’s Medical College of the New York Infirmary, noting her thesis topic as “Endometritis.” Woman’s Medical College of the New York Infirmary (N.Y.). Annual catalogue and announcement. New York: S. Angell, 1871.

Cushier stayed on at the Infirmary, beginning as an intern before becoming a resident physician. Her practice was devoted to obstetrics and gynecology, but an interest in normal and pathological histology led to eighteen months of study in Zurich with a Professor Ebert, who offered her laboratory opportunities that were not yet available to women in the United States. Laboratory research, pathological and post-mortem study, lectures, and bedside clinics all enriched her knowledge before she returned to New York.

The Woman’s Medical College of the New York Infirmary on Stuvvesant Square. Woman’s Medical College of the New York Infirmary (N.Y.). Annual catalogue and announcement. New York: M.J. Rooney, 1891.

On her return, Cushier went right back to the Infirmary, and worked to expand the practice of gynecological surgery there. Thomas Addis Emmet and T. Gaillard Thomas, who were on the staff at the Woman’s Hospital (and both of whom were NYAM Fellows), allowed her to attend clinics there, and the Infirmary, in its larger home on Stuyvesant Square, eventually added a modern operating room for both gynecological and abdominal surgeries. As her work at the Infirmary and her private practice continued to grow, she published articles and case studies, mainly about gynecological and obstetrical subjects.[ii]

In 1882, Cushier’s personal life changed significantly when she and Emily Blackwell (1826–1910) began to live together in Blackwell’s home on East 20th Street. Cushier and Blackwell also bought a summer home, Seawold, near York Cliffs, Maine, in 1893. After the Woman’s Medical College closed its doors in 1899, both women retired from practice and headed to Europe, where they spent eighteen months. On their return, they gave up their city home, moving to Montclair, New Jersey, where Cushier’s niece, Dr. Emily Mercelis, also lived. When Blackwell died in September 1910, just a few months after her older sister Elizabeth (1821–1910) died in England, Cushier called the moment “an irreparable break in my life.”[iii]

Elizabeth Cushier and Emily Blackwell’s home in Montclair, NJ. Photograph by Elisa Rolle, originally published in her Queer Places: Retracing the Steps of LGBTQ People around the World. CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2017.

Cushier lived for another 20 years, going to Maine in the summers and living in Montclair for the rest of the year. No longer engaged in the practice of medicine, she felt her days were not useful, until the First World War brought the opportunity to do relief work for French and Belgian women and children and for servicemen through the Red Cross. She died on November 25, 1931, her 94th birthday, and is buried, alongside her parents, in Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn.

________

Notes

[i] Kate Campbell Hurd-Mead, MD. Medical Women of America: A short history of the pioneer medical women of America and a few of their colleagues in England. Froben Press; 1933: 85.

[ii] A full list of Cushier’s publications can be found in Creese, Mary RS. Ladies in the Laboratory? American and British Women in Science, 1800–1900: a survey of their contributions to research. Scarecrow Press, 2000: 392.

[iii] Hurd-Mead. Medical Women of America, 92.

Charles Terry Butler: An American Doctor in World War I

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By Paul Theerman, Ph.D., Director of the Library

A hundred years ago this week, medical doctor Lt. Charles Terry Butler (1889–1980) entered Germany with the Army of Occupation. Yes, the Armistice had been signed a full three weeks prior, but “Charlie’s war” was not yet over. He would remain in uniform for over four more months. Through his detailed memoir, A Civilian in Uniform [1], we have   insight into his war service and the work of Evacuation Hospital #3, which followed the American war effort across France and into Germany in 1918 and 1919.

1st Lt. Charles T. Butler, MRC, US Army Sept. 1917

Image: A Civilian in Uniform, b/t. pp. 124-125.

As detailed in a previous blog entry, in 1916, Butler, newly graduated from medical school, spent six months as a volunteer surgeon in a British-French military hospital outside Paris, the “war before the war” for Americans.  His experience at Ris-Orangis turned out to be crucial for his later war service. Three months after he returned home, the United States entered the war on the side of the Allies. Butler’s adventures over the next two years capture much of the American medical experience of the Great War.

Butler’s first “battle” was to avoid getting drafted into the infantry so that he could serve in the medical corps.  A draft started right upon declaration of war on April 6th, and as a young man of 27, Butler was likely to be called up. He instead volunteered for the Army Medical Reserve Corps, where, with a medical degree, he received a commission as a first lieutenant in August. He was directed to go to Camp Greenleaf in Fort Oglethorpe, Georgia, by September 15th for additional training. [2] Afterwards, Butler shipped from Hoboken on January 12, 1918, bound for Saint-Nazaire, France, at the mouth of the Loire River, arriving on the 27th. Within a few weeks, Butler’s medical contingent was sent up the Loire and was divided, half to a hospital in Tours and half to one in Blois, both well behind the lines. He would serve separately in these locations over the next five months.

Postcard showing Evacuation Hospital #3. Image: Charles Terry Butler papers, New York Academy of Medicine.
Index to MOTC training lectures and notes. Image: Charles Terry Butler papers, New York Academy of Medicine.

In early July, as part of “Evacuation Hospital #3,” he was moved to Rimaucourt, in the département of Haute Marne, close to the front. On July 29th, the operation moved to La Ferté-Milon “70 K. from Paris, about 23 K. from the Front.” [3]

The sound of guns was plainly audible; the signs of war were everywhere about. The station was almost wrecked—one end blown to atoms by a shell that had come through the roof. Everywhere were shell holes; among the tracks, in the platforms, and in the fields.… Houses everywhere were gaping ruins—roofs knocked off, holes in the walls, windows smashed. For, until the first Allied counteroffensive started, the enemy were within 4K. of the town. [4]

Entire route of Evacuation Hospital #3, 1/27/1918-4/12/1919.

Entire route of Evacuation Hospital #3 in France, where Butler served, from St. Nazaire to Brest. Image: A Civilian in Uniform, b/t pp. 354 and 355.

That afternoon he and his comrades explored the devastated town; less than a week later, the hospital was moved to Château-Thierry and then Crezancy. Butler’s hospital formed part of the medical services supporting the first major American military action in the War. “The camp at Crezancy was the first at which the organization came face to face with all kinds of casualties straight from the front.” [5] His unit remained close to the fighting, treating the wounded of the many battles of the Meuse–Argonne offensive, up until the Armistice on November 11th that marked the War’s end. On that day, Butler wrote to his mother from behind the lines at Verdun:

Everyone is wild with joy! The war ended this morning at eleven. But it’s hard to realize. Automatically we camouflage our lights, but I don’t doubt will get out of that habit before long. . . . They had a big bonfire after supper [tonight] to celebrate with speeches, song, etc. . . . Now we are wondering what will happen to us. There is some talk of our going into Germany with the Army of Occupation, but we have as good chance of getting home fairly early. [6]

Home early was not to be: in December the unit moved north through Luxembourg to Trier, Germany. There it provided medical services for Allied soldiers held in a military prison hospital. For the first time, Butler noted the Spanish Flu in his war reminiscence:

Worn out by months of fighting, their resistance exhausted from the long march, hundreds fell easy prey to the virulent flu-pneumonia bug that was epidemic. While I was in charge of the pneumonia ward, of the 153 admissions, 50 died—one-third. A soldier would come in on his feet and be dead in 48 hours.  The work was utterly frustrating. . . . [7]

Charles Terry Butler July to December 1918 personal diary

Pages from Butler’s diary, which was written from July to December, 1918. Image: Charles Terry Butler papers, New York Academy of Medicine.

After four months, the unit was ordered home. It left Trier on March 27th and arrived in Brest, France, on the 31st, then embarked by ship on April 12th for Hoboken, arriving on the 20th. On April 27th, Butler was discharged from the military at Fort Dix. Between his volunteer service in 1916–1917, and his military service in 1917–1919, he had served over two years, or half of the war.

Charles Terry Butler in July 1975.

Charles Terry Butler in July 1975. Image: A Civilian in Uniform, p. 399.

After the war, Butler married, had children, and entered private practice, but by 1923 rheumatoid arthritis led him to retire. Moving to the Ojai Valley of Ventura County, California, he became a prominent civic and cultural leader. In 1975, after many years of work, he privately published A Civilian in Uniform as perhaps “the most complete account of one of the most active large mobile evacuation hospitals” in the First World War. Butler died in 1980.

Reading through A Civilian in Uniform one learns the reason for its writing: to combine the historical and the personal. Throughout the work, Butler mixed his letters and diary entries with understanding of the war and the official account of his hospital unit. He was justly proud of that unit:

This outfit, through trial and error and after many varying experiences in battle areas, had reached a state of efficiency in all departments that may have served as a useful guide for the structure and administration of evacuation hospitals in World War II. [8]

And of his role:

Yet when, from the multi-thousands of wounded who passed through the portals of these two hospitals, are sorted out the hundreds who owe much of their future physical well being to the professional performance of one single individual, and perhaps that man’s work during those years of bloodshed warrants, in philosophical perspective, a place a notch or two above the microscopic level. [9]

For many, the attraction of war may come from the desire to play a role in a venture of world-wide consequence. For Butler, this played out through his medical work in World War I.

The New York Academy of Medicine Library also houses Butler’s papers.

References:

[1] Charles Terry Butler, A Civilian in Uniform (Ojai, CA: “Private edition,” 1975).
[2] Butler was expected to outfit himself for his service, in the amount of $275.00 for uniforms, insignia, blankets, cots, and incidentals such as mirrors, electric lights, and candles. He received $2,000 a year in compensation, from which were deducted the premium for War Risk Insurance—life and disability insurance provided through the government—and $1.00 a day for officers’ mess! Butler, A Civilian in Uniform, 123–24.
[3] Butler, “Diary,” July 30, 1918, A Civilian in Uniform, p. 230.
[4] Butler, “Diary,” July 30, 1918, A Civilian in Uniform, pp. 230–31.
[5] Butler, A Civilian in Uniform, p. 248.
[6] Butler to “Mother” [Louise Collins Butler], November 11, 1918, in A Civilian in Uniform, pp. 312–13.
[7] Butler, A Civilian in Uniform, p. 332. There also Butler was assigned the task of writing the history of Evacuation Hospital #3, which formed much of the basis of A Civilian in Uniform.
[8] Butler, A Civilian in Uniform, p. 364.
[9] Butler, A Civilian in Uniform, p. 355–56.

The Red Cross Institute for Crippled and Disabled Men and the “Gospel of Rehabilitation”

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Today we have a guest post written by Ms. Julie M. Powell, 2018 recipient of the Audrey and William H. Helfand Fellowship in the History of Medicine and Public Health. Ms. Powell is a PhD candidate at The Ohio State University, her dissertation topic explores the growth of wartime rehabilitation initiatives for disabled soldiers and the rhetoric that accompanied and facilitated this expansion. 

In May 1917, one month after the United States joined the First World War, the American Red Cross created the Institute for Crippled and Disabled Men to “build up re-educational facilities which might be of value to the crippled soldiers and sailors of the American forces.”[1] To this end, Director Douglas McMurtrie (1888–1944) collected approximately 3,500 separate books, pamphlets, reports, and articles from the European continent, North America, and the United Kingdom and its Dominions. He and his research staff pored over the documents, authoring reports, news articles, and lectures that were subsequently fed back into circulation both in the United States and abroad. A look at the collection and the work of the Institute provides a window into the development of rehabilitative care in the early twentieth century, demonstrating that transnational medical networks operated and expanded throughout the war and that the transmission of information and ideology often went hand in hand.

RedCross building_watermarked

The Red Cross Institute for Crippled and Disabled Men, 1918.

The proliferation of literature on rehabilitation (including surgical amputation, orthopaedics, prosthetic design, physical therapy, and vocational re-education) can be attributed both to a sense of urgency—20 million men were wounded in the war—and to the relative newness of the field. The first orthopaedic institute was created in Munich in 1832 and the next in Copenhagen in 1872 but these, and others that followed, focused exclusively on care for disabled children. The first significant moves toward the retraining of adults were taken up in the two decades before the war. In 1897, in Saint Petersburg, disabled men began to be trained in the manufacture of orthopaedic devices and in 1908, with the founding of a school in Charleroi, Belgium, the industrially maimed were taught bookbinding, shoe repair, basket making, and more. The first retraining school for invalided soldiers was created in December 1914 in Lyon, France, four months after the outbreak of hostilities. The school provided the inspiration for over 100 similar schools throughout France. The period 1915–1917 saw a proliferation of orthopaedic and re-education institutions throughout Europe and the western world. It was on these models that the Red Cross Institute was founded.

The first institution of its kind in the United States, the Red Cross Institute for Crippled and Disabled Men resided at 311 Fourth Avenue (now Park Avenue South) in New York. Disabled men, either funded by the U.S. Army or attending through no-interest loans, trained in four trades: welding, mechanical drafting, printing, and the manufacture of artificial limbs. McMurtrie and his staff hosted meetings of disabled men—punctuated by cake and ice cream—wherein testimonials from the recently rehabilitated served as recruitment tools for the Institute.

But the broadest impact of the Institute came from its crusade to spread what McMurtrie referred to as the “gospel of rehabilitation”—an insistence on returning the disabled man to independence and self-sufficiency that he might eschew charity and compete fairly in the labor marketplace. Such notions were deeply rooted in classical liberalism, a foil to large-scale social welfare programs that would only emerge in the wake of the Second World War. In The Disabled Soldier, McMurtrie wrote plainly:

When the crippled soldier returns from the front, the government will provide for him, in addition to medical care, special training for self-support. But whether this will really put him back on his feet depends on what the public does to help or hinder, on whether the community morally backs up the national program to put the disabled soldier beyond the need of charity… In light of results already obtained abroad in the training of disabled soldiers, the complete elimination of the dependent cripple has become a constructive and inspiring possibility. Idleness is the great calamity. Your service to the crippled man, therefore, is to find for him a good busy job, and encourage him to tackle it. Demand of the cripple that he get back in the work of the world, and you will find him only too ready to do so.[2]

no longer handicapped_watermarked

A reproduction (right) of part of McMurtrie’s poster exhibit for the Institute featuring the liberal “gospel of rehabilitation”: self-sufficiency, competition, and independence from charity.

McMurtrie’s gospel sounded the same notes as the works of U.S. Allies across the pond, whose material he’d spent years collecting. In 1918, famed novelist, advocate of the war wounded, and editor for the rehabilitation journal Reveille, John Galsworthy warned against the perils of charity, of “drown[ing] the disabled in tea and lip gratitude” and thereby “unsteel[ing] his soul.” Rather, he wrote:

We shall so re-create and fortify…[the disabled soldier] that he shall leave hospital ready for a new career. Then we shall teach him how to tread the road of it, so that he fits again into the national life, becomes once more a workman with pride in his work, a stake in the country, and the consciousness that, handicapped though he be, he runs the race level with his fellows, and is by that so much the better man than they.[3]

John Galsworthy, Wikipedia.org.
Douglas McMurtrie, LibraryThing.com

Such rhetoric was of a piece with appeals from British Minister of Pensions, John Hodge, for the restoration of men to “industrial independence,” that they might “hold their own in the industrial race.”[4]

When McMurtrie invited the world’s newly-minted experts in rehabilitation to New York in 1919, they shared—as they had through pamphlets, pictures, and films—not just information but ideology. Discussions on war surgery and the organization of rehabilitation schemes unfolded side-by-side with talks on public education and encouragement of the disabled to train.

Such propaganda efforts were critical. According to McMurtrie: “The self-respect of self-support or the ignominy of dependence—which shall the future hold for our disabled soldiers?” The credit or blame, he held, would rest with a public that either demanded self-sufficiency or patronized its men with charity.

References:
[1] Douglas C. McMurtrie, The Organization, Work and Method of the Red Cross Institute for Crippled and Disabled Men (New York: The Red Cross Institute for Crippled and Disabled Men, 1918).
[2] Douglas McMurtrie, The Disabled Soldier (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1919), 37.
[3] John Galsworthy, “Foreword,” The Inter-allied Conference on the After-Care of Disabled Men: Reports Presented to the Conference (London: His Majesty’s Stationary Office, 1918): 13–17. Reprinted in his book of essays Another Sheaf (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1919).
[4] John Hodge, “The Training of Disabled Men: How We Are Restoring Them to Industrial Independence,” Windsor Magazine no. 281 (1918): 569–571.
[5] McMurtrie, The Disabled Soldier, 75.

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Charles Terry Butler and the “War before the War”

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By Paul Theerman, Associate Director

The centenary of the United States entry into World War I was this past April. But wars—even those having such sharp cease-fires as this one did, on November 11, 1918—rarely have well-defined beginnings and endings. Even before the official American entry, Americans served in France from the outbreak of the war in 1914. Expats in Paris formed the American Ambulance (the term then meant field hospital), which spun off the American Field Service, charged with transporting wounded soldiers from the front line and providing immediate care. In direct combat, the famed Lafayette Escadrille was founded in 1916, made up of volunteer American air fighters under French command, who battled the Germans up until actual American military deployment two years later. And in the realm of battlefield medicine and surgery, Americans served as volunteers in France from 1914 up to 1917. One of the most noted was Dr. Joseph A. Blake (1864–1937) who, at the outbreak of war, resigned from his prominent surgical positions at Presbyterian Hospital and Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons, and went to France. There he successively headed up three volunteer hospitals in Neuilly, Ris-Orangis, and Paris, up until his induction to the American military medical corps in August 1917 where he continued his work.

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“Merry Christmas to J.A.B” [Joseph A. Blake, chief surgeon and hospital director], December 1916. Image: Charles Terry Butler papers, New York Academy of Medicine Library.

Blake had an outstanding reputation, so much so that he readily attracted both funds and workers. One such surgeon was Charles Terry Butler (1889–1980) whose memoir, A Civilian in Uniform (1975), and personal papers are held in the Academy Library. Butler was born in Yonkers, New York, to a prominent family. He was the son of lawyer William Allen Butler, Jr., whose father, William Allen Butler, Sr., both lawyer and author, was himself the son of Benjamin Franklin Butler, U.S. attorney general in the Andrew Jackson and Martin Van Buren administrations. Charles Butler led a life among the New York elite. As one example, he remembers that his family hosted William Howard Taft to dinner during his presidency.[1] Butler went to Princeton University, where he graduated in 1912, and then to medical school at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons. After his graduation in 1916, he was due to take up an internship at Presbyterian Hospital that July. He postponed it to January in order to serve under Blake, then at the Anglo-French volunteer hospital in Ris-Orangis, France, some 25 miles southeast of Paris. As Butler put it:

My two year internship would be put off six months, but here was the opportunity to learn the treatment of serious war wounds under a great surgeon, perhaps my only chance to have such training, and if the United States were forced into the war, I would be much more useful to the Army.[2]

Blake promised Butler scant remuneration, 400 francs travel expenses each way, and 100 francs a month salary, relying on his “contribution” to aid the cause.[3]

Butler_watermark

Charles Terry Butler identity card for Ris-Orangis hospital, June 1916. Image: Charles Terry Butler papers, New York Academy of Medicine Library.

Butler left for Liverpool on May 27, and—after a long period of negotiating his credentials to enter France, as authorities were concerned about German infiltrators—he arrived at the Ris-Orangis hospital on June 10. A converted college, long empty before its refitting, the hospital was organized by two English patrons and operated by private donations and support from the French military. The hospital held about 200 beds, with a surgical theater and supporting radiology and bacteriological facilities, as well as, of course, kitchens and laundries.

with patient_watermark

Charles Terry Butler dressing a wound with the aid of two nurses, 1916. Image: Charles Terry Butler papers, New York Academy of Medicine Library.

ward_watermark

A recovery ward, 1916. The flags of Britain and France are mounted at the window, as this hospital was a joint effort: operated within the French military hospital system, sponsored by private British philanthropy, and staffed by American surgeons. Image: Charles Terry Butler papers, New York Academy of Medicine Library.

Butler’s letters home trace his awakening to war and medicine. Within a week, he wrote to his uncle Clare:

The hospital has about 200 beds, and on my arrival I was put in charge of two wards with over 90 beds and some 80-odd patients. It was some contract to start with, and for two or three days I hardly knew whether I was coming or going. I did about forty dressings a morning with three nurses to help me, and two getting their patients ready for dressing ahead of me and bandaging up when I was through. It took over three hours of hard, steady work.[4]

After a month, to his mother:

Last Sunday, 65 new blessés arrive—the majority of them frightfully wounded. They come by ambulance from a distributing railroad station some 6–7 kilometers away. Arriving in bunches of four or eight, they are sent immediately to their beds. Most of the orderlies had been given leave that day, so we doctors had to turn to and help carry them to the wards. (It isn’t particularly easy carrying a large man on a heavy stretcher with his trappings up three flights of stairs.) There they are undressed; their clothes put in a bag, tagged, and sent to be sterilized and cleaned; and then bathed. . . . The next thing is food. Many have not had anything for 24 hours or more while en route from the front or the last hospital. Then the surgeon comes along. Dressings, casts, splints, etc. are removed so as to see the condition and nature of the injury. It would be impossible to describe the state of some of the wounds—many not having been dressed for several days, some even for 10 or 14 days. A hasty and rather superficial cleansing must suffice for the time being, until the patient comes back from the X-ray room. … All the wounds are terribly infected, and a large percentage have foreign bodies (balls, pieces of shell, clothing, stones, dirt, etc., etc.) lodged…. [Surgery followed, aided by X-ray and fluoroscopy.] The recoveries are wonderful. Men whom no one would expect to live, ordinarily, in a civil hospital, hang by a hair for days and come around O.K.[5]

Butler noted that the average length of stay at the hospital was almost 50 days.

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The staff of the Ris-Orangis Hospital, 1916. Dr. Joseph A. Blake, director, is the central figure (second row, seated); Charles Terry Butler is the third man to his left. Image: Charles Terry Butler papers, New York Academy of Medicine Library.

Ris-Orangis was considered one of the most successful hospitals in the war. [One of the founders, Harold J. Reckitt, wrote a detailed history of the hospital, V.R. 76: A French Military Hospital (1921)]. Butler spent most of his time dressing wounds, with little occasion for actual surgery. He returned to New York in January 1917 to take up his internship at Presbyterian. But upon the American entry into the war in April 1917, he was commissioned a first lieutenant with the United States Medical Corps, serving into 1919—the topic of a future blogpost. Butler’s experience at Ris-Orangis was crucial to his surgical accomplishments in this second phase of war service. After the war, he entered private practice, but by 1923 ill health—apparently resulting from wartime conditions—led Butler to retire. Moving to the Ojai Valley of Ventura County, California, he became a prominent civic and cultural leader up to his death in 1980.

Transporting the wounded by train, 1916.
Ambulances and drivers of the Ris-Orangis, 1916.

References:
[1] Butler, Charles Terry. A Civilian in Uniform. Butler, 1975, p. 28.
[2] A Civilian in Uniform, p. 49.
[3] Blake to Butler, 29 April 1916, A Civilian in Uniform, p. 49.
[4] Butler to “Uncle Clare” [Clarence Lyman Collins (1848–1922)], 17 June 1916, A Civilian in Uniform, p. 57.
[5] Butler to “mother” [Louise Terry Collins (1855–1922)], 7 July 1916, A Civilian in Uniform, p. 62–64.

Images:
Charles Terry Butler, “Ris-Orangis, France, 1916,” photographic album. Charles Terry Butler papers. New York Academy of Medicine Library.

Sigmund Freud on War and Death

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By Paul Theerman, Associate Director, Center for the History of Medicine and Public Health

4.Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), photograph by Max Halberstadt, n.d., from NLM’s Images from the History of Medicine, Image Order Number B012346.

Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), photograph by Max Halberstadt, n.d., from NLM’s Images from the History of Medicine, Image Order Number B012346.

Sigmund Freud was born this day in 1856. Just one hundred years ago, a scant six months or so into the Great War, he set down Reflections on War and Death, his thoughts on the meaning of the war that had already spun out so violently—and that had more than three years yet to go.

Freud was at the top of his career in 1915. He started carving out the distinct field of psychoanalysis in 1895, with Studies in Hysteria, followed by The Interpretation of Dreams (1899), The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901), Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905), and numerous other books and articles. From 1902 he had gathered a group of physicians that became the nucleus of the psychoanalytic movement. In 1909, Freud undertook a triumphal tour of the United States. He founded The International Psychoanalytical Association in 1910; the American and New York groups came about the following year. And in 1912, Freud founded Imago: zeitschrift für anwendung der psychoanalyse auf die geisteswissenchaften, a journal that applied psychoanalysis to history, philosophy, and the social sciences. It was in Imago that the essay, “Reflections on War and Death” appeared, as “Zeitgemäßes über Krieg und Tod.”1

In his essay, Freud wished to present a worldly estimation of the carnage gripping Europe. He wrote, “The civilized world-citizen . . . may find himself helpless in a world that has grown strange to him when he sees his great fatherland disintegrated, the possessions common to mankind destroyed, and his fellow citizens debased.”2 While regretting the violence that the war had unleashed, he also professed not to be particularly surprised. European civilization was not nearly as moral as people had believed, he wrote. He contrasted two forms of moral development. One was hard won by deep psychic change: the transformation of evil and selfish impulses to beneficent social ends under the influence of “the love needs of man interpreted in the widest sense.”3

Sigmund Freud, “Zeitgemäßes über Krieg und Tod,” Imago: zeitschrift für anwendung der psychoanalyse auf die geisteswissenchaften 4(1) (1915): 1-21.

Sigmund Freud, “Zeitgemäßes über Krieg und Tod,” Imago: zeitschrift für anwendung der psychoanalyse auf die geisteswissenchaften 4(1) (1915): 1-21.

The second form, indistinguishable from the first in peacetime, was enforced by a system of rewards and punishments that elicited moral behavior: good conduct is rewarded, and bad punished. However, in the chaos of wartime, the system showed itself for the sham that it was: no shame attached to the horrendous acts perpetrated between warring states. Freud explained this with the scant consolation: “our mortification and painful disappointment on account of the uncivilized behavior of our fellow world citizens in this war were not justified. . . . In reality they have not sunk as deeply as we feared because they never rose as high as we believed.”4

Cover of Freud's Reflections on War and Death, translated by A. A. Brill and Alfred B. Kuttner (New York: Moffat, Yard, and Company, 1918).

Cover of Freud’s Reflections on War and Death, translated by A. A. Brill and Alfred B. Kuttner, 1918.

In 1918, the year after America joined the war, Abraham Arden Brill (1874–1948), one of the founders of the psychoanalytic movement here, and Alfred B. Kuttner (b. 1886), a literary figure and film critic, translated and published Freud’s work, with this introductory note:

This book is offered to the American public at the present time in the hope that it may contribute something to the cause of international understanding and good will which has become the hope of the world.

This hope was based in a clear-eyed look at the basest human instincts, and the insight that change meant resolution at a deep psychic level, not to be gained by simple moralizing or hand-wringing. The last 100 years have produced a dispiriting number of examples of the failures to which Freud pointed. And the book remains in print to this day.

References

1. Imago 4(1) (1915): 1-21.

2. Sigmund Freud, Reflections on War and Death, translated by A. A. Brill and Alfred B. Kuttner (New York: Moffat, Yard, and Company, 1918), p. 16.

3. Freud, Reflections on War and Death, 21.

4. Freud, Reflections on War and Death, 29.

What Soldiers Read

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By Johanna Goldberg, Information Services Librarian

During World War I, the American Library Association (ALA) undertook a million-dollar campaign to bring libraries to soldiers in United States training camps and cantonments. The ALA detailed these efforts in its regularly published War Library Bulletin and War Libraries, distributed by its Library War Service.

"Action in the New York City campaign." From War Library Bulletin, volume 1, number 6, April 1918.

“Action in the New York City campaign.” From War Library Bulletin, volume 1, number 6, April 1918. Click to enlarge

The ALA asked each United States city to contribute monetarily in “an amount equivalent to 5% of its population” and collected books and magazines at local libraries. These materials went to ALA-established collection centers throughout the country before being forwarded to camps. (The Red Cross and Y.M.C.A. took on the work of distributing reading materials to troops abroad.) By January 1918, the ALA had raised more than $1.5 million dollars to build and staff libraries, buy additional titles, and transport materials.

What kind of reading material did soldiers want?

"What books do the men read?" From War Library Bulletin, volume 1, number 4, January 1918.

“What books do the men read?” From War Library Bulletin, volume 1, number 4, January 1918.

Soldiers also read for pleasure. As Burton E. Stevenson wrote in the January 1918 War Library Bulletin article “What Soldiers Read”:

"Men now have time to read." From War Library Bulletin, volume 1, number 4, January 1918.

“Men now have time to read.” From War Library Bulletin, volume 1, number 4, January 1918.

There is an impression in some quarters that our soldiers have no time to read. Nothing could be further from the truth. Most of them have more real leisure than they ever had before. They are free practically every evening, and not only free, but without the distractions most of them had in civil life. There are no parties, no dances, no social engagements, and many of them find that the most pleasant way to spend an evening in camp is with a book. So, in one camp, one man has started to read Boswell’s “Life of Johnson.” Another is wrestling with Bergson’s “Creative Evolution.” Another has started Gibbon, and is working hard to finish it before he is sent to France. Still others are beginning courses of reading in various branches of English literature, under the direction and guidance of the librarian.

The cover of the June 1918 War Library Bulletin trumpets the campaign’s successes:

The front cover of War Library Bulletin, volume 1, number 7, June 1918.

The front cover of War Library Bulletin, volume 1, number 7, June 1918.

"Delivery counter at Camp Lewis A. L. A. library." From War Library Bulletin, volume 1, number 4, January 1918.

“Delivery counter at Camp Lewis A. L. A. library.” From War Library Bulletin, volume 1, number 4, January 1918. Click to enlarge.

But there was still more to be done: the August 22, 1918 War Libraries issued a new challenge: “We are going to ask the American people, in the week beginning November 11, 1918, for $3,500,000 with which to carry on the Library War Service for another year.”

On the very date selected by the ALA, of course, World War I ended. The next year, President Wilson proclaimed the date Armistice Day; in 1954, November 11 became Veterans Day to honor all American veterans, not just those from World War I.1

By the end of the war, ALA’s Library War Service had raised more than $5 million and distributed more than 10 million books and magazines. There were also long-term results: the Library War Service’s work led to the founding of the American Library in Paris and American Merchant Marine Library Association.2

The back cover of War Library Bulletin, volume 1, number 7, June 1918. Click to enlarge.

The back cover of War Library Bulletin, volume 1, number 7, June 1918. Click to enlarge.

References

1. United States Department of Veterans Affairs Office of Public and Intergovernmental Affairs. History of Veterans Day. Available at: http://www.va.gov/opa/vetsday/vetdayhistory.asp. Accessed November 6, 2014.

2. Online Archive of California. Preliminary Inventory to the American Library Association War Service Records, 1917-1923. Available at: http://www.oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/tf8n39n9nm/admin/#did-1.7.1. Accessed November 6, 2014.