Nurses and patients alike often suffered “gas fright” or “gas mania” even when no gas was present. During an attack, nurses had to worry not only about putting on their own gas masks, but also masking their patients. Some of the poisons used could kill or maim long after the shelling stopped, and available gas mask technology was still rudimentary. Despite treaties banning the military use of poison, World War I saw the first large-scale use of poison gases on the modern battlefield, including chlorine phosgene and “the king of battle gases,” mustard gas, which the Germans first deployed in Ypres only two weeks before Fairchild arrived.īy that time, poison gas could be reliably delivered by artillery on average, at least one in every 10 shells was gas. Gibbon, a physician on Fairchild’s unit, later told historian Paul Hoeber, “The casualty clearing stations were frequently the scene of the most distressing sight which a human eye can witness, that is the re-wounding of already wounded men by an enemy’s bomb dropped suddenly in the dead of night.”īombs and shells were bad enough, but gas attacks were the stuff of nightmares. In a letter to her mother in August, Fairchild wrote, “We all live in tents and wade through the mud to and from the operating room where we stand in mud higher than our ankles.”īad weather was the least of her worries. The weather was miserable, with constant wind and rain. 4 in the Ypres-Passchendaele area of Belgium. In late July, Fairchild was assigned to Casualty Clearing Station No. The “Pennsylvania 64” sailed to England in May 1917 as part of the American Expeditionary Forces, about to bear witness to what became known as “the chemist’s war.” “Oh, I Shall Have Books to Tell When I Get Home” assignment, the nurses volunteered for deployment to Europe. On April 16, 1917, Congress declared war on Germany. Early in 1917, Fairchild and 63 of her colleagues joined the U.S. President Woodrow Wilson was trying to remain neutral in the evolving conflicts in Europe.įor the next four years, Fairchild practiced nursing at Pennsylvania Hospital while beginning the course of prolific letter-writing to her family that would become the foundation of her legacy. The women’s suffrage movement was in full swing, still fighting to ratify a constitutional amendment granting women the right to vote. When she graduated in 1913, the average life expectancy of a white woman in the United States was about 49 years. Helen Fairchild was 26 years old when she left farm life in rural Pennsylvania to enter nursing school in Philadelphia. Originally from a small town in Pennsylvania, Helen Fairchild later became the first American nurse to die in service during World War I, a casualty of that war’s most horrifying weapon: poison gas.
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