Alice Louise Florence Fitzgerald wa a nurse and international health care administrator.
Background
She was born in Florence, Italy, the daughter of Charles H. Fitzgerald and Alice Riggs Lawrdson. Her parents had become enamored of Europe on their honeymoon and settled there permanently. Independently wealthy, they employed private tutors to educate their children in Italian, German, French, and English.
Education
Fitzgerald also attended the Convent of the Sacred Heart in Florence and, later, a finishing school in Germany.
Although Fitzgerald's education was interrupted by trips to Italy to care for her mother and by her own sickness from overwork, she graduated in 1906 and remained on the Johns Hopkins staff through 1908.
Career
Following her debut in Baltimore at the age of nineteen, Fitzgerald announced her intention to pursue a career as a nurse. She never married. When she reached the mandatory age of twenty-five she was accepted by the Johns Hopkins Hospital Nurses Training School, but her mother's illness caused a two-year postponement of her enrollment.
While visiting her parents in Italy in 1908, Fitzgerald volunteered for duty in the aftermath of the earthquake at Messina, Sicily.
Fitzgerald resumed her position at Johns Hopkins, becoming head nurse in 1910. During 1911-1912 she served as head nurse of the operating rooms at New York's Bellevue Hospital and reorganized the nursing service there. In 1912 she became superintendent of nurses at Wilkes Barre City Hospital in Pennsylvania.
A similar position at Robert W. Long Hospital in Indianapolis in 1915 enabled her to introduce public health nursing in Indiana; she conducted a pioneering public relations campaign to explain the role of visiting nurses in homes, schools, and factories.
Fitzgerald served in a general hospital at Boulogne, France, and at makeshift medical facilities in tents on the Somme front. In his poem, "The Merciful Hand, " Vachel Lindsay praised her work: "Your fine white hand is Heaven's gift /To cure the wide world, stricken sore, /Bleeding at the breast and head, /Tearing at its wounds once more. "
After transferring to the American Red Cross in 1917, Fitzgerald established a hospital at Rimini, Italy. As supervisor of nurses and nurses' aides assigned to the hundred military hospitals of the French Service de Santo in 1918, she cared for wounded Americans. Appointed Chief Nurse of the American Red Cross for Europe on May 10, 1919, she surveyed nursing in Poland.
In 1922, working for the International Health Board of the Rockefeller Foundation, Fitzgerald surveyed nursing in the Philippines. As adviser to Philippine Governor General Leonard Wood, she upgraded nursing standards and established a nurses' training facility to provide care for the mountain people.
She introduced public health nursing courses at the University of the Philippines (previously, island nurses had to travel to the United States for advanced studies).
Fitzgerald returned to the United States in 1929, having circumnavigated the globe in her effort to publicize modern nursing.
She retired in 1948. Fitzgerald spent her last years at the Peabody Home in the Bronx, New York, where she died.
Politics
As adviser to Philippine Governor General Leonard Wood, she upgraded nursing standards and established a nurses' training facility to provide care for the mountain people.
Views
Quotations:
In an interview conducted several years before her death, she said: "I have had a lovely life. I was so happy in my work in all those countries that I never took a vacation. Work was recreation. ."
During her stay in Thailand she said of her profession: "Nursing has developed best in countries where the medical profession is most up to date, where it has outgrown its fear of a rival in 'nurses' and where it has encouraged cooperation, collaboration and partnership through appreciation of what it means. "