ABOVE: Aboard the Red Cross. Red Cross nurses en route to France. Sept. 9, 1918. Glass negative, 5" x 7". Gift; American National Red Cross 1944 and 1952. American National Red Cross photograph collection (Library of Congress) Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C.
FACING PAGE: A festive ward at Camp Hospital 33 in Brest, Finistere, France, December 1918. Personnel from Base Hospital 34 in England helped staff Hospital 33. The photo was featured in an episode on American Nurses in the Great War in the PBS - American Experience series, The Great War.
CORA ELM The Episcopal Church established a tradition of training Indian nurses on the Wisconsin Oneida reservation near Green Bay late in the 19th
After excelling in her studies, she was century. Missionary Solomon S.
Burleson and Bishop Charles Chapman Grafton founded the Wisconsin Oneidas’ Episcopal Hospital between 1893 and 1898. It employed two Oneidas who were among the first hospital/nursing school trained Indian nurses in the United States, Nancy Cornelius, who attended the United States Indian Industrial School at Carlisle, Pa., and Lavinia Cornelius who attended Hampton Agricultural and Normal Institute. Cora Elm, later Mrs. James E. Sinnard, was another Episcopal-sponsored nurse. She was born on the Wisconsin Oneida reserva- tion in 1891. What we know of her childhood was that her grandmother was a midwife and that she grew up on a farm at Oneida. She entered Carlisle on Dec. 23, 1906, and gradu- ated on Sept. 24, 1914.
30 AMERICAN INDIAN FALL 2018
admitted to the Episcopal Hospital School of Nursing in Philadelphia, opened in 1888 to attend to the health needs of the poor in North Philadelphia. The nursing school was later made part of the Temple University Health System. It closed its doors in 2009. In an interview conducted on Jan. 8, 1942
by the federal government’s Works Projects Administration, Elm discussed how she came to train as a nurse and how it led to her mili- tary service in World War I: “I have been asked so many times by some of the Oneidas how I happened to join the Red Cross Army Corps. I try to tell them that I could not have been admitted if I was not a graduate nurse, and then they would give me a surprised look and ask me when and where I trained.” She continued,
“After my graduation
at Carlisle I went to Philadelphia, Penn., and started to train. Some wealthy people I worked for helped me, and my father paid my tuition. I came home to visit only once while
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