Description
Collection consists of manuscript belonging to Madelaine Endicott Boutrell, 17 Bay State Road, Boston, containing lecture
notes from a course of seven lessons on surgical dressing and wound care, taken between 14 April 1917 and 1 May 1917, at Peter
Bent Brigham Hospital and elsewhere in Boston. The course begins with a section entitled "Material: cost and source of supply"
(including costs and the names of several suppliers), before highlighting various dressings, gauzes, compresses, fracture
pillows, etc., to be used in the field. Although possibly already a student nurse at the hospital, it also is conceivable
that Boutrell's enlisting in the Red Cross course was prompted by Woodrow Wilson's "War Message" to a special session of Congress,
delivered twelve days before she began the class, that led to the overwhelming passage of the War Resolution to bring the
United States into World War I. In 1916 the Women's Bureau of the Red Cross recruited women across the United States to make
surgical dressings for sister societies in war-torn Europe. The American Red Cross Production Corps expanded the program in
1917 to meet the needs of the American military.