Nurses at the Front: Writing the Wounds of the Great War

Ellen La Motte (1873-1961) and Mary Borden (1886-1968) are two of the best known American nurses who wrote about their experiences working in the same field hospital on the Western front during World War I. La Motte's The Backwash of War (1916) and Borden's The Forbidden Zone (1929)—both of which are presented here—highlight in powerful, vivid and often haunting prose each woman's acute observations of the stark realities of battle and the severe conditions under which military medicine is practiced.