Rensselaer Journal, Volume 10, Number 49, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 16 May 1901 — HEAD OF OUR ARMY NURSES. [ARTICLE]

HEAD OF OUR ARMY NURSES.

Mrs. Dit* EL Kl*a*y Enjoy* the Unique end Honorable Dlitlionoo. Mrs. Dit* H. Kinney bolds the unique distinction of commanding a corps in the regular army, says Leslie’s Weekly. Her force, however, is not made up of fighting men. It comprises the young women serving in the American military hospitals scattered all over the world. There are hundreds of these gentle Samaritans in the army nursing corps. In their soft uniform of white linen, with a tiny red cross attached to the collar, they are to be found in the farthest corner of the earth where the stars and stripes have been planted. Wherever they may be, all these army nurses are under the control of Mrs. Kinney, and from her office in the war department at Washington she directs the work of the entire corps. The position takes with it the responsibility of nursing an army of over 100,000 men, and it is the most important ever held by a woman nurse. Although women had long been employed in attending the sick soldiers of Britain and of France, yet there was no such thing as a corps of female nurses in the American army until the outbreak of the Spanish-American war. Since then they have been retained as a permanent institution. The nurses must be graduates from a training school giving a two-year course, and they are paid from S4O to $75 a month. Mrs. Kinney, who was graduated from one of the Boston hospital schools several years ago, joined the corps soon after the outbreak of the war. She served in the great hospital at the Presidio in San Francisco, and was in charge of the surgical word. Several weeks ago she was ordered by telegraph to report to Surgeon General Sternberg at Washington. Though much puzzled at the instruction, she hurried on to the capital. There she was amazed to find that she had been elevated to the command of the entire nursing corps.