© Mary T. Sarnecky
Jane Arminda Delano was born in 1862
in Montour Falls, New York to George and Mary Ann Wright
Delano. Delano had no recollection of her father, who
apparently died of yellow fever in Louisiana while
serving as a Union soldier in the Civil War. Expediency,
the story went, forced his compatriots to bury the elder
Delano in an unmarked grave.1 As a young
woman, Delano taught school for a time but later decided
to become a trained nurse. She realized this ambition,
graduating from Bellevue Training School in New York City
in 1886. Following graduation, Delano became
superintendent of nurses at Sandhills Hospital in
Jacksonville, Florida, during a raging yellow fever
epidemic. While there she placed window screens and used
mosquito netting in the patient care area and in the
nurses' lodgings, an innovation in an era when scientists
only suspected that mosquitoes might carry the disease.2
When the epidemic subsided, she left Florida traveling
west and subsequently nursed at a copper mining camp
hospital on the Mexican border in Bisbee, Arizona during
a typhoid epidemic.3 Life in the wild west
proved exciting. She later reminisced, ". . . in
those days, the Apache Indians were usually on the
war-path and we never dared stir out without a revolver. 4
Delano faced other terrors on the rough and ready
frontier. She told of how:
All one long dark night she lay awake, listening
to a mystifying, terrifying sound just outside her
hut. It seemed to come, inch by inch, nearer to her
window. She watched the intense blackness lighten
with the dawn, expecting to see the evil face of the
marauder. When daybreak came, after an infinity of
waiting for the realization of her terrors, she
discovered that it was only her burro rubbing his
sides against the corrugated tin walls of her shack.5
In 1891, Delano returned east to serve as
superintendent of nurses at University Hospital in
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. After a five year tenure
there, she attended medical school in Buffalo, New York,
but decided to abandon plans to become a physician,
matriculated at the New York School of Civics and
Philanthropy, and subsequently continued nursing.6
She then assumed the challenging responsibilities of
superintendent at the House of Refuge, a shelter for
wayward girls, on Randall's Island in the East River of
New York City. From 1902 until 1906, she was the
superintendent of the prestigious Training School at
Bellevue Hospital, finally leaving there to care for her
dying mother in Charlottesville, Virginia.7
Following a brief respite, Delano almost
simultaneously assumed four demanding roles. In 1908, she
became the president of the Associated Alumnae and
president of the Board of Directors of the American
Journal of Nursing. In 1909, she accepted both the
chairmanship of the American Red Cross Nursing Service
and the superintendency of the Army Nurse Corps.8
Four years earlier when so few nurses answered the
call to the reserves, Delano and her peers, Anna Maxwell
and Mary Gladwin, had signed up for the Nurse Corps
(female) reserve. All three were beyond the maximum 45
year age limit, but they did not list their ages on the
application forms. The Army accepted the distinguished
trio without question.9 From then on, Delano
completely dedicated herself to the idea of a nursing
reserve. Her efforts probably saved the short-lived Army
Nurse Corps from extinction.
Jane Delano assumed her duties in the surgeon
general's office on 12 August 1909. She served there
until 31 March 1912, resigning to devote all of her
energies to the American Red Cross. Much of the credit
for recruiting the majority of the 21, 480 Army nurses
who served during World War I can be ascribed to Delano.
After the war, Delano traveled to Europe to visit with
the nurses she enrolled. While there she fell ill with
mastoititis. She died on 15 April 1919 and was buried in
Savenay, France.10 In 1920, the Army
Quartermaster Corps exhumed Delano's body, returned it to
the United States, and reinterred it in the nurses' plot
at Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia.11
- Some discrepancies in Delano's
birth year exist. Linda Sabin, "Jane Arminda
Delano, 1858 (1862?)-1919," in Vern L.
Bullough, Olga Maranjian Church, & Alice P.
Stein, American Nursing, A Biographical
Dictionary (New York: Garland Publishing Company,
1988): 78-80; Mary A. Clarke, R.N. Memories of
Jane A. Delano (New York: Lakeside Publishing
Company, 1934); Mary E. Gladwin, The Red Cross
and Jane Arminda Delano (Philadelphia: W.B.
Saunders, 1931), 28.
- "Jane A. Delano the Great War
Nurse, Her Imperishable Contributions to the
Profession She Adorned," American Red Cross
Records, The National Archives, Washington, D.C.;
Mary E. Gladwin, The Red Cross and Jane Arminda
Delano (Philadelphia: W.B. Saunders, 1931), 32.
- The primitive town had only one
bath tub. The tub's hospitable owners allowed
Delano to visit on Saturday nights and have a
weekly bath. However she had to furnish her own
"towels, soaps and scrub brushes." Mary
A. Clarke, R.N. Memories of Jane A. Delano (New
York: Lakeside Publishing Company, 1934), 4.
- Lavinia L. Dock, Sarah E. Pickett,
Clara D. Noyes, Fannie F. Clement, Elizabeth G.
Fox, & Anna R. VanMeter, History of American
Red Cross Nursing (New York: The Macmillan
Company, 1922), 355.
- Mary E. Gladwin, The Red Cross and
Jane Arminda Delano (Philadelphia: W.B. Saunders,
1931), 35.
- Annie W. Goodrich, "Jane
Delano," 12 March 1931, typewritten
manuscript, Annie W. Goodrich Papers, Manuscripts
and Archives, Yale University Library, New Haven,
Connecticut.
- Clara D. Noyes, "A Great
Nurse," The Red Cross Bulletin 3 (May 12,
1919), 10; "Jane A. Delano, the Great War
Nurse," reprint from Red Cross Courier of
March 16, 1931, American Red Cross Records, The
National Archives, Washington D.C.
- Ibid.
- Eleanor Lee, History of the School
of Nursing of the Presbyterian Hospital, New
York, 1892-1942 (New York: G.P. Putmam's Sons,
1942): 40.
- Dock et al., History of American
Red Cross Nursing, 1000-1003.
- Julia C. Stimson to Clara Noyes,
27 August 1920; and H.F. Rethers to J.L. Rogers,
31 July 1920; both in Record Group 112, The
National Archives, Washington, D.C.