First British Red Cross Nurse
LOUISA ELISABETH McLAUGHLIN (1836-1921), my great-aunt, was one of the first British women to serve as a nurse for the Red Cross.
Louisa – who often spelled her name MacLaughlin – is pictured wearing medals awarded by both the
French and Germans for running Ambulances (as field hospitals were then called) during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870.
The same medals were awarded to Louisa's partner EMMA MARIA PEARSON (1828-93), the elder daughter of Captain Charles Pearson, RN (1784-1856) and his wife Maria, of Great Yarmouth.
On August 16, 1870, Louisa and Emma went to France together with a Mrs. Mason and a Miss E. A. Barclay, a surgeon, a paid nurse, and a secretary, at the behest of the just-formed National Society for Aid to the Sick and Wounded in War (precursor to the British Red Cross).
A week later they were nursing about 100 men desperately wounded in the Battle of Gravelotte.
Passing through fields of burned corpses, they set off again, under orders to report to the King of Prussia at Sedan, but he raced out of the city as they arrived.
They joined the Anglo-American Ambulance at the invitation of its American surgeon-in-chief, Dr. James Marion Sims.
The Ambulance, set up in a barracks the day before the Battle of Sedan left 5,000 dead and 20,000 wounded, had beds for 384.
Its eight British and eight American surgeons also attended to another 200 in tents.
Major operations, always assisted by Louisa, were done by the other surgeon-in-chief, Mr. (later Sir) William MacCormac. [British surgeons spurn the title ‘Doctor’].
He performed 138 amputations resulting in 61 deaths.
According to the Lancet the high mortality was due to wounded men being left on the battlefield up to five days and having to wait another day or two for their operation.
McCormac's Notes and Recollections of an Ambulance Surgeon endorses Dr. Sims' "tribute of praise to the lady-nurses."
To read their full story, click Our Adventures During the War of 1870.
Reformatted into 310 printable pages with my notes, a map and a timeline, this pdf needs Adobe Reader: click here to get the latest version.
The original two volumes (364 & 418 pages) are also available as
facsimile eBooks.
English Ambulance wagons outside Paris, November 1870
Catharine Williams, a Protestant nun, also wrote a Franco-Prussian War Diary (in All Saints Sisters of the Poor ed. Susanne Mumm. 2001. pages 207-270 with informative notes).
She came to the Anglo-American Ambulance with another sister and a curate. The next day they were sent to a small ambulance at Balan in exchange for Mrs. Mason and Miss Barclay.
Sister Catharine, aged 53, believed this was plotted by Emma (portrayed as an hysterical conceited coward) because she was jealous of the attention the doctors were giving the nuns.
The real objection was that they were too prudish to take off their habits and wash themselves.
They also insisted on eating alone: conversation was too frivolous at the table where Mr. MacCormac and Dr. Sims sat with Emma and Louisa, relishing horseflesh soup and an occasional treat of horseflesh steaks proudly cooked by Dr. Sims' former slave 'Nigger Charlie.'
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After a month in Sedan, Emma and Louisa were told to go to Paris with half of the Ambulance under Dr. Thomas Pratt, who had replaced Dr. Sims, his father-in-law. When they reached Versailles, the Germans forbade the Ambulance to enter Paris.
Instructing the nurses to return to England, Colonel Robert Loyd-Lindsay, chairman of the National Society, put the Ambulance at the command of Prince Pless, who ordered it to serve with the German Army Ambulance Corps in Orléans.
In England Emma and Louisa were told that the Society would not support them if they set up an ambulance for which the Bishop of Orléans was pleading.
They declared they would make an independent appeal.
Loyd-Lindsay retaliated by revoking the Society's legal agreement with them.
The nurses' appeal in the Times enabled them to return to France with 4,000 pounds of stores.
They established their Ambulance Anglaise in a convent with two big buildings in a suburb of Orléans.
A major battle soon broke out, and the fighting seemed heaviest around their convent, according to Charles E. Ryan, a surgeon with the Anglo-American Ambulance.
Despite the turmoil, compounded by shortages of food, drink and supplies, out of 1,400 patients the nurses lost only 40.
"Too much praise cannot be given for the untiring zeal and heroic self-sacrifice which they always displayed in the discharge of their mission, under circumstances which were constantly most trying," Ryan declared in With an Ambulance during the Franco-German War.
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Red Cross nurses tending to the wounded of the French Army of the East during the Franco-Prussian War |
They received the Cross of Honour of the French Red Cross (upper right) “together with a request that in any future war they will serve again with the French ambulances.”
The Emperor of Germany presented them with the War Medal (right).
They were also awarded the Sanitats Kreuz Militar of Hesse-Darmstadt (lower right).
On their return from France, the nurses published Under the Red Cross, a series of papers in the St. James’s Magazine, reprinted in book form in 1872.
To read this brief history of wartime nursing as a pdf file, click here.
The last chapter makes many recommendations.
More than mere nursing qualifications are needed in the field: nurses should be good linguists, active and cheerful, with tact, fertility of
resource, and knowledge of the country; their leaders should be women accustomed to train their servants into the ways of a household.
Allowances should also be made for differences of constitution among foreign soldiers: the wine, beef, and beer necessary to sustain a German patient would drive a French one into a raging fever; but the weak potage, the vin ordinaire, and the beef stewed to rags with vegetables, which sufficed for a Frenchman’s wants, would have been starvation to a German.
Louisa and Emma worked for the National Health Society established in 1869 by Europe’s first modern woman doctor, Elizabeth Blackwell, an Englishwoman who had gained a degree in New York.
Her Society undertook relief work for the London poor and gave lectures on health education.
Emma is described in the 1871 Census as a lecturer and nurse, so it may be inferred that she was trained by Dr. Blackwell.
Louisa, a pupil of Sister Dora, was almost certainly the better trained.
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Red Cross quarters in Servia |
Emma and Louisa were living in South Hill Park Hampstead in August 1876 when the Serbo-Turkish War broke out.
They immediately set off as volunteers to work with the Red Cross Society of Servia.
Armed with green-lined parasols and Hartin’s Crimson Salt disinfectant, they took care of wounded Servian soldiers who had been struggling against Turkish oppression.
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Read the nurses’ Service in Servia Under the Red Cross as a pdf file with my notes and maps, or as an eBook.
Servia rewrote the statute that only men could win the Gold Cross of the Order of the
Takova (right) so as to award it to the nurses.
In December 1876, Louisa’s portrait (top) was taken in the Rome studio (managed by G. Borelli) of Luigi Montabone, photographer to the King of Italy.
The nurses stayed in Rome until the following May.
Their plan, announced in the Times of 2 April 1877, for an Anglo-American nursing home and hospital in Rome, did not materialize for lack of financial support.
© 2006 G. Harry McLaughlin.
Reproduction or transmission, in whole or in part, for other than personal use
is prohibited without advance permission from
Dr. G. H. McLaughlin.