With high hopes: women contract surgeons in World War I

Minerva: Quarterly Report on Women and the Military, Summer, 2002 by Mercedes Graf

Despite the prevailing attitude that held women doctors should not be at the front, she was accepted as a contract surgeon and sent to the United States General Hospital No. 1 in Williamsbridge, New York. There she received three months' intensive training in anesthesia before she was sent overseas on an English refugee ship that had been recently torpedoed and displayed a large steel plate covered over the hole to prove it. As Hocker boarded the vessel, boxes of T.N.T. were being carefully loaded on at the same time. When she arrived in France, she was assigned to a surgical team while the battle of the Argonne was in full blast around her. For ten days with only a few hours' sleep at night, she worked in a makeshift operating room constructed in the lobby of an abandoned hotel. She had almost no time to catch her breath before she was ordered to follow the troops in the drive to Metz that took place the first part of November 1918. With constant air battles raging over her head, she continued her work at an Evacuation Hospital, and when the Armistice was signed she remained in France carrying on her anesthetic work at base hospitals. When the camp was closed she was ordered home and she "almost regretted it"--a sentiment that other woman doctors and nurses reported in postwar years, regardless of the war in which they served. (18)

Like Elizabeth Van Cortland Hocker, Dr. Frances Edith Haines wanted to do what was considered the unthinkable in 1918--volunteer as an army doctor. After she graduated from medical school at the University of Nebraska in 1913, she worked in Chicago, Illinois, as an anesthetist in Presbyterian Hospital and taught anesthesia at Rush Medical College. (19) When war broke out, she was determined to become an army surgeon (her father and five brothers had been Union soldiers from Indiana) and she engaged in a futile correspondence for months with the Surgeon General's Office. Realizing she was not likely to be successful in her quest unless she had male support, she solicited the aid of Lieutenant-Colonel Lewis (Chief Surgeon of U. S. Base Hospital Unit No. 13 in Hoboken, New Jersey) who needed an anesthetist for the unit. (20) While this strategy was successful as it led to her appointment as a contract surgeon, Haines commented regretfully: "Not being a man was the only thing which prevented my being commissioned." (21)

On May 19, 1918, she sailed on the Justicia from New York Harbor with the officers of Base Hospital No. 13--the first woman physician in the U. S. army to be sent overseas. After a short stint in England, she was sent to France. In early June she was housed in the temporary hospital barracks that had been erected at Limoges, but the first convoy of patient arrived before the corpsmen and nurses could set up all the beds or unpack any equipment. In less than a week another convoy arrived, bringing the total count of wounded to some 900 soldiers. Haines was in charge of anesthesia, and since many of the nurses had been sent to the front, she had to train enlisted men in the administration of ether. She recalled that "we worked all day and some of us worked all night." When her tour of duty ended, she had served nine months "in a land of blackouts or poor illumination."