During the summer of 1960, I discovered Sue Barton-Student Nurse while searching the young adult section of the Brooklyn Public Library. This was my first introduction to the lively red-headed nursing student who would be the main character in a fictional book series written between 1934 and 1952 by Helen Dore Boylston. Captivated by the interesting tale of the hospital experiences of a student nurse, I spent the last weeks of summer hunting down all seven novels in the Sue Barton series. After reading every one, I searched for more.
My librarian told me the author had written Clara Barton’s biography. There was also a book of Helen’s wartime experiences serving as a nurse in France during World War I. Although she tried, my librarian wasn’t able to get her hands on a copy of Sister: The Diary of a War Nurse in the New York library system then. However, in 2015, I discovered that Uncommon Valor Press published an electronic copy on the Kindle platform which I immediately purchased. Helen’s diary is filled with many of the very real and difficult challenges military nurses faced during the first World War. Helen proved to be a spirited and adventurous young nurse, facing many wartime challenges with skill and determination, much like the fictional character she would later write about.
At the age of 21 and fresh out of Massachusetts General School of Nursing, Helen joined the Harvard Medical Unit and went overseas in 1917. She was assigned to a French field hospital dangerously close to a casualty clearing station, a mile from the fighting front. In addition to field nursing, she was selected to administer anesthesia during surgeries. She wrote that the nurses were often awakened in the middle of the night by enemy gunfire and ordered to spend the remainder of the night in a foxhole cocoon sleeping with their “furry animal friends.”
The Germans advanced and retreated during the last year of the war, forcing the field medical team to constantly evacuate, assemble, and reassemble their units. The harsh winter weather was hard on her health, too. Like many other dedicated nurses, she frequently hid her sore throat and stifled her coughs so that she could continue to work. Twice, she was ordered to the Hospital for Nurses at Chateau Villa Tino and reluctantly spent weeks recuperating from throat infections and diphtheria.
The numbers of soldiers the nurses cared for each day was staggering. Helen wrote:
“I have just received a letter from my supervisor with April’s hospital report. It states: ‘We hold a record for British hospitals. In 10 days, we admitted 4,853 wounded, sent 4,000 to Britain, performed 935 operations, and only 12 patients have died.
I had no sooner arrived, when I was put to work. Sister assigned two of us to dressing changes. Hour after hour and all through the day and night, the soldiers from the casualty clearing station poured in. We had a system: Nurse Allen was stationed at table one, ripping and pulling off bandages. After a fair share of cursing and howling from the soldiers, they moved on to the doc. Then they came to my table where I bandaged them up as quickly as I possibly could. The three of us worked over 24 hours straight in this manner. By the next day, we counted our logs and noted that we had dressed over 500 wounded soldiers. When I finally had time to rest and close my eyes, I continued to unroll, cut, and tape bandages while I slept.”
Once home after the war, adventurous Helen signed up with the Red Cross and returned to Europe to serve in the Balkan War. She wrote: “Daddy wants me to settle down, but I’m young! I’m young! Why shouldn’t I live? What is old age if it has no memories except of 40 years or so of blank days?” She continued to work in Europe until 1924, returning again in 1926.
On a train trip to Paris, Helen met Rose Wilder Lane, a journalist and war correspondent. The two became fast friends. In 1927, Rose invited Helen to Rocky Ridge, her parents’ home in Mansfield, Missouri. It was there that Rose encouraged Helen to publish the diary she had written during the war. Rose was also assisting her mother, Laura Ingalls Wilder, in re-writing her childhood diaries. Little House in Big Woods was published in 1932. It was the first volume of the popular eight-book Little House on the Prairie series released between 1932 and 1948.
Until she retired, Helen worked in various nursing positions in New York and New England. She worked as a staff nurse and head nurse in New York and Connecticut hospitals, as well as the director of an outpatient department. She returned to her nursing school at Massachusetts General to work as an anesthesiology instructor. Throughout her nursing career, she continued to write, and all of her different nursing roles and experiences are reflected in her writing. As Helen assumed different nursing positions, Sue Barton worked her way from student nurse to public health nurse to nursing director in her fictional career.
For me and many of my peers, Helen’s fictional characters influenced us to consider the possibility of nursing as a career, expanding our career choices which were somewhat limited 50 years ago. At the time, young women could be homemakers, secretaries, or teachers. It should also be noted that Sue Barton worked as a married woman with three children in the last book, a role model for the young women of the 1950s and 1960s who grew up with the belief that they had to choose between a working career and motherhood.
I remember Helen Dore Boylston as the author who introduced me to the many roles a registered nurse can have during a nursing career. Of course, there are many occupations where one can choose between a staff position and management, but nursing opens up an unlimited array of possibilities. As I look back on my 40 years in nursing, I was a staff nurse, supervisor, director, community health educator, adjunct faculty instructor, clinical nurse specialist, and genetics nurse. I am absolutely certain that no other career offers young men and women such diverse opportunities in one career choice! And I have Helen to thank for opening my eyes to this all those years ago.
Here are some of Helen’s published works for if you are interested in further reading:
• Sister: The War Diary of a Nurse (1927)
• Sue Barton, Student Nurse (1936)
• Sue Barton, Senior Nurse (1937)
• Sue Barton, Visiting Nurse (1938)
• Sue Barton, Rural Nurse (1939)
• Sue Barton, Superintendent of Nurses (1940)
• Sue Barton, Neighborhood Nurse (1949)
• Sue Barton, Staff Nurse (1952)
• Carol Goes Backstage (1941)
• Carol Plays Summer Stock (1942)
• Carol on Broadway (1944)
• Carol on Tour (1946)
• Clara Barton: Founder of American Red Cross (1955 and 1963)
• Travels With Zenobia: Paris to Albania by Model T Ford (with Rose Wilder Lane) (1983)
Carole Limata, MSN, RN, is the author of Luna Babies and the Ellis Angels series: Ellis Angels: The Nurses of Ellis Island Hospital, Ellis Angels on the Move, and Angels in Brooklyn. She is a member of Sigma’s Nu Xi at-Large Chapter in California, USA, and in 2017, she received an Excellence in Nursing Research Award from her chapter in recognition of her nursing history research.