Under the Aegis of Humanitarianism: American Women Nurses and the Transnational Origins of the US Public Health

This paper examines the transnational circulation of modern ideas on health and hygiene at the turn of the twentieth century through an analysis of public health activities of American women nurses in the Caribbean and Pacific islands. Since the “Spanish American War” in 1898, the U.S. Army had continuously sent its physicians and nurses to Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines. While working at army hospitals, these medical staff set up public health programs for indigenous people in these islands as well. The public health measures mobilized a large number of American women nurses for their actual enforcement in local communities. At the “front” of infection control by the U.S. administration in the Caribbean and Pacific islands, these American women played a critical role on a practical level. The previous historiography of colonial medicine has pointed out much about the transmission of Western ideas on health and hygiene to colonized areas. Recent scholarship also focuses on the appropriation of these medical ideas by the colonized for their own ends. Yet, the story should not end here. Once their duties in the islands were over, after all, most of American medical workers went back to the U.S. mainland with their newly acquired knowledge of colonial medicine. After their return to the United States, not a few of these women nurses embarked on new ventures of public health nursing, often drawing on their colonial experience for their new work. Some women switched to visiting nursing enterprises for the poor, while others moved to quarantine work at immigration stations. Framing the history of colonial medicine as a global circulation of medical ideas between colonizing and colonized countries, this paper unveils the hidden process of re-transmission of medical ideas, transformed and added new meanings in colonial settings, from occupied areas to the United States.