BY DAWNE DEWEY,
HEAD OF SPECIAL COLLECTIONS AND ARCHIVES
Born in Yellow Springs, Ohio, in 1887, Alice Carr knew she wanted to be a nurse from an early age.
Upon graduation from Johns Hopkins Nurses Training School in Baltimore in 1914, she wrote home, “We put on our blue uniforms and caps today…and we feel like sure enough blue nurses now. I really feel like I belong to Hopkins and that I can do most anything set before me. A blue chambray dress and a crinoline cap have made me one of the happiest women in these United States.”
Alice worked at John Hopkins Hospital until the U.S. entered WWI in 1917. She wrote home, “Today I am sending you the morning paper and an Extra announcing war. It is very exciting to hear it called. I have signed the muster roll...wild horses couldn’t hold me back.”
Alice was in the first contingent of Red Cross nurses to sail for Europe in June 1917 and worked at a base hospital near Verdun, France, until 1919. After the war, she was a Red Cross nurse in Poland, Lithuania, Serbia, Smyrna, Czechoslovakia, and Syria. In 1923, she joined the Near East Foundation and worked to improve conditions for refugees and children, fighting disease and establishing child welfare and medical service centers.
On a road trip in 1928 from Baghdad to Smyrna, with $10,000 in cash intended for Assyrian relief work in her pocketbook, her car broke down. She was stuck in the desert alone for three days until British and Assyrian soldiers found her and delivered her safely to Mosul. Expelled from Greece by the Nazis in 1941, she returned to the U.S. and continued to work for the Near East Foundation until her retirement in 1948. She died in 1968 at the age of 81.
A 1938 Reader’s Digest article on Alice described her: “At times, soft and completely feminine, Miss Carr is often a tough, unflinching martinet who will tear red tape to shreds, spend money she hasn’t got, and fight fiercely any person who tries to oppose her plans for aid to the suffering.”
Alice Carr was definitely a woman with nerve.
You can learn more about her story in the Special Collections and Archives in the Wright State University Libraries.