With high hopes: women contract surgeons in World War I

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

She began her work in September 1919 assigned as assistant to the head of the medical department. Her job was to help in surgery or do whatever was needed to keep the clinic running although there were 16 doctors stationed there. Many of the patients consisted of family members of those who had been sent overseas, and it was her feeling that no doctor "ever had a queerer lot of patients." For instance, Kratz described the case of a widow of a general of the Civil War who thought the Army Medical Service was not what it used to be because the clinic did not have red flannel bandages for her varicose veins. While her duty had its lighter moments, she was soon overwhelmed with work when the flu epidemic hit. Fourteen of the sixteen doctors were stricken and Kratz also had a mild attack. After the Armistice, she resigned her contract as there was little to do at the clinic, and she and her husband went to live in California where they raised a family.

In July of 1918, Dr. Gertrude F. McCann decided she was tired of trailing around behind her husband who was in the service and had been sent around the United States as well as Panama. When he was sent overseas, she signed a contract and was stationed in Washington D.C. in the laboratory division of the Surgeon General's office. The work was challenging as it gave her a view of the medical and epidemiological problems that arise as an army is mobilized. She also read papers submitted for publication by medical officers and censored them lest "they give aid and comfort to the enemy." (29) Following her discharge she worked as an assistant in experimental work in diabetes and vitamin deficiencies, and was a research fellow and instructor in pathology at the College of Physicians and Surgeons at Columbia University until 1922. She devoted the next five years to rearing her two children before she became the medical advisor to women at the University of Rochester in 1927. The hiatus that she took from medicine was a common practice with other female doctors who felt that child rearing was also one of their most important roles. As a matter of fact, combining a family with a career was a central dilemma in the lives of female practitioners not just during and immediately after WWI, but up to and at the present time.

Because women doctors were likely to come in contact with other physicians, it was not unusual for them to marry their colleagues. When she was a new bride, Dr. Agnes Scholl Ruddock's physician-husband, John, who was president of the Los Angeles County Medical Association, was called to active duty with the Navy. Determined to do her part as well, she began military work in May of 1918 at the Rockefeller Institute where she was the only woman doctor taking the special course given in medicine to army officers. Ruddock studied the main diseases associated with army life--typhoid, pneumonia, meningitis, tropical diseases and serology. In July she was sent to camp Merritt in New Jersey where she did conducted bacteriological studies for the different camps of the Port of New York. In looking back on those years, she stated: "During the influenza epidemic, conditions were very serious at the camp and the laboratory was busy far into the might with bacteriology, serology, vaccine preparation and autopsies." (30)