Alice Fitzgerald Collection

During World War I, she was selected as the Edith Cavell Memorial Nurse from Massachusetts and served as an American Nurse with the British Expeditionary Forces at Hospital No. 13 in France from 1916-1917. Upon America’s entrance into the war, she resigned to join the American Red Cross and served in France and Italy, at the Paris Headquarters, at zone headquarters in Bordeaux, as chief nurse in the Service de Sante in Paris, and at a Hospital in Rimini for Venetian refugees. She remained in Europe after the war as Chief Nurse of the American Red Cross Commission in Europe. She organized local nursing schools and public health nursing services in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Montenegro, and Albania. In Oct. 1919, she became the first Director of the Nursing Bureau of the League of Red Cross Societies in Geneva. She started the International School for Public Health Nurses for the Florence Nightingale International Foundation in London. She returned to the United States briefly in 1921.

In 1922, she went to the Philippines for 2 years at the request of the International Health Board of the Rockefeller Foundation as an advisor on Public Health Nursing to Governor General Leonard Wood, where she organized a public health nursing service. In 1923 she, along with the Filipino nurses she was training, assisted in earthquake relief work in Japan. Starting in 1924 she surveyed the nursing needs in Siam, Hongkong, and Singapore. In 1926 she started a nursing school at Siriraj Hospital in Bangkok. This was followed by a survey of nursing in China in 1928. She returned to the United States in 1929 and completed a survey of nursing schools in the state of Maryland for the Maryland State Board of Nurse Examiners. She was director of nurses at Polyclinic Hospital in New York from 1930-1936. She then resigned to write her memoirs and raise marmosets. In 1940 she was awarded a medal for her work with the American Bureau for Medical Aid to China. Her last nursing position was as housemother in the nurses home at Shepard Pratt Hospital in Baltimore. She retired from active nursing in 1948. She lived the remainder of her life at Peabody Nursing Home in New York City, where she died on Nov. 10, 1962.

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