Backwash Of War: The Human Wreckage Of The Battlefield As Witnessed By An American Hospital Nurse
- Length
- 2 h 39 min
- Chapters
- 13
- Language
- English
- Genre
- War & Military, Medical, Modern (20th C)
- First published
- 1916
Ellen Newbold La Motte (1873–1961) was an American nurse, journalist and author. … and in 1915 volunteered as one of the first American war nurses to go to Europe and treat soldiers in World War I. In Belgium she served in a French field hospital, keeping a bitter diary detailing the horrors that she witnessed daily. “I am a professor of American studies and recently spent several years researching the life of Ellen N. La Motte, a long-forgotten nurse and public health crusader. In particular, I focused on her war writing. Soon after World War I began, she volunteered as a nurse in a French field hospital; later she published an explosive book of stories, “The Backwash of War,” about the experience. I spent endless hours immersed in those deeply unsettling and darkly humorous tales of wounded and sick hospitalized soldiers…. Cynthia Wachtell is a research associate professor of American studies at Yeshiva University…” (New York Times 22 May 2020)
Chapters
From LibriVox, read by volunteers and in the public domain. LibriVox page (opens librivox.org), the text (opens gutenberg.org), all files on the Internet Archive (opens archive.org).