Things: Historic Spanish-American War Nursing Photo

Nurses Given Copy of Historic Photo
Dr. Charles H. Schlichter, of 556 North Broad St., has presented a framed copy of a valuable photograph to the nurses at the Elizabeth General Hospital, which is of historic interest to the community. The picture shows the first group of trained nurses to serve with the U.S. Army, together with the army medical personnel which served at the Post Hospital, Fort Wadsworth, Staten Island, during the Spanish American War. Dr. Schlichter was instrumental in making arrangements for the group of twenty-one nurses to go to Staten Island from the Red Cross Auxiliary in New York City.

Dr. Schlichter possessed the only original copy of the photograph in existence, taken in September 1898, by an itinerant photographer who visited the Staten Island Post. This he presented on the day of Roosevelt's death to the U. S. Army Surgeon General, Maj. Gen. Norman T. Kirk, as a gift for the present U.S. Army Nurse Corps. Inasmuch as the photograph depicts the first group of trained nurses ever to have served officially with the U. S. Army, it seems to Dr. Schlichter fitting that it should belong to the archives of the Nurses Corps.

Two copies of the original picture were made for Dr. Schlichter, who will give the second one to his grand-daughter, Miss Mary Anne McConahay, now in training as a Cadet Nurse in St. Barnabas Hospital, Newark.

Dr. Schlichter appears in the photograph with a group of officers seated in the center of the picture, flanked by the young Red Cross nurses in their quaint, old-fashioned uniforms. In two rows at the back of the picture are the mustachioed men of the army medical personnel at the Post Hospital. Among them are two other Elizabethans, the late Theodore Fred Richard, who was hospital steward in the Third New Jersey Infantry, and a Mr. Blair, also deceased, who at one time worked in the Oliver & Drake Drug Store.

At the time the photograph was taken, Dr. Schlichter was first lieutenant and battalion assistant sergeant of the Third New Jersey Volunteer Infantry, and had just been transferred to Fort Wadsworth from Sandy Hook. In July of 1898, the hospital, then very sketchily organized with a small untrained staff of Hospital Corps enlisted men, received a message that the army transport "Olivette" was off the Quarantine Station at Clifton, Staten island, with several hundred sick and wounded aboard, all badly in need of medical care. Dr. Schlichter was sent by the post commanding officer to New York City to negotiate with Mrs. Whitelaw Reid and Mrs. Winthrop Crowden about the prospect of obtaining the services of Red Cross nurses for the army hospital. The women, upon hearing from the young lieutenant of the acute emergency at Staten Island, departed for Washington and promptly obtained permission from the Secretary of War to dispatch the nurses to Staten Island.

Captain Euclid B. Frick, (now Col. E. B. Frick, retired and living in California) was post surgeon, and Dr. Schlichter was made executive officer of the hospital. Between the two of them, and with the help of the new nurses, they soon had the hospital in fine running order. This opened the eyes of many medical officers who previously had frowned upon female nurses serving in the army and merited commendation from the surgeon general at the time, George M. Sternberg, who visited the post and praised the work of the nurses.

Transcribed from Elizabeth Daily Journal, May 10, 1945 (Evening Edition)

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