Avi Ohry
Tel Aviv, Israel

Louisa May Alcott (1832–1888), author and poet, served as a nurse during the United States Civil War. In 1862, she worked at the Union Hotel Hospital in Georgetown, Washington, DC, where she found appalling conditions. She attended the wounded, fed them, and assisted at operations until she contracted severe typhoid fever herself. She based her book Hospital Sketches on her military service.^1,2

Walter Whitman Jr. (1819–1892), poet and journalist, spent three years as a nurse assistant during the Civil War after his brother was wounded at Fredericksburg. He published war poems describing its horrors³, such as “The Wound Dresser”, excerpted below:

Bearing the bandages, water and sponge,
Straight and swift to my wounded I go,
Where they lie on the ground after the battle brought in,
Where their priceless blood reddens the grass, the ground,
Or to the rows of the hospital tent, or under the roof’d hospital,
To the long rows of cots up and down each side I return,
To each and all one after another I draw near, not one do I miss,
An attendant follows holding a tray, he carries a refuse pail,
Soon to be fill’d with clotted rags and blood, emptied, and fill’d again.

Agatha Christie (1890–1976), author, was a nurse with the Red Cross during the First World War. Like Alcott, she became ill and was sent to recover. She studied pharmacology, returned to that hospital, and worked as a paid medication dispenser.^4-6

Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961), author and Nobel Prize Laureate (1954), drove ambulances in Italy during World War I (reflected in his A Farewell to Arms). He was wounded and moved to Paris to become a war correspondent.^7,8

Edward Estlin Cummings (1894–1962)⁹ was an American poet-author and painter who served during World War I as a volunteer ambulance driver in France. He openly expressed anti-war views and spoke of his lack of hatred for the Germans. In 1917, five months after starting his assignment, he was arrested by the French military on suspicion of espionage and was held for three and a half months in a military detention camp in Normandy.¹⁰

Max Beckmann (1884–1950) was a well known German expressionist, painter, sculptor, and writer. During World War I, he volunteered as a medical orderly in the Medical Corps in Belgium, experienced the atrocities of war, and had a nervous breakdown. His “injuries of the soul” deeply affected his art.

Max Liebermann (1847–1935) was a famous Jewish-German impressionist painter and printmaker. During the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1871, he volunteered with the Order of St. John. An unhealed broken arm prevented him from joining the military service, and he served as a medic during the siege of Metz. The horrible experiences of war affected him deeply.^11-13

Georg Trakl (1887–1914) was an Austrian expressionist poet who vividly expressed anxiety and fear of a violent death. Before the war, Trakl worked in a pharmacist’s office. He enlisted in the military, serving as a pharmacist and medic at a hospital in Innsbruck. As a medical officer, he was sent to the Eastern Front, there sinking into depression and attempting to commit suicide. He was sent to a psychiatric hospital in Krakow, where he injected himself with cocaine and died. He wrote in his poem “Gródek” (translated by AllPoetry):

In the evening the autumnal forests tint
Of deadly weapons, the golden plains
And blue lakes, above them the sun
Gloomy rolls down; embraces the night
Dying warriors, the wild lament
their broken mouths.
But still gathers in the willow ground
Red clouds in which an angry god dwells
The spilled blood, moon coolness;
All roads lead to black decay.

These are just a few examples of artists who served in various capacities. Many others were killed in action (French poet Apollinaire¹⁴) or became paraplegic from their war wounds (Joë Bousquet, a French poet-philosopher¹⁵).

References

1. Choperena A, Fairman J. Louisa May Alcott and Hospital Sketches: An innovative approach to gender and nursing professionalization. J Adv Nurs. 2018;74(5):1059-67.
2. Woodward W. New surprises in very old places: Civil War nurse leaders and longevity. Nurs Forum. 1991;26(1):9-16.
3. Whitman W. An American Hospital. Hospital (Lond 1886). 1895;18(446):34. 
4. Scheindlin S. More poison from Agatha Christie. N Engl J Med. 1994;331(10):683.
5. Kinnell HG. Agatha Christie’s doctors. BMJ. 2010;341:c6438.
6. Gerald MC. Agatha Christie’s drugs and disease. Pharm Hist. 1992;34(2):95-107.
7. Martin CD. Ernest Hemingway: a psychological autopsy of a suicide. Psychiatry. 2006;69(4):351-61.
8. Dieguez S. ‘A man can be destroyed but not defeated’: Ernest Hemingway’s near-death experience and declining health. Front Neurol Neurosci. 2010;27:174-206.
9. Rosenblitt JA, Siegel LS. E.E. Cummings and dyslexia. Ann Dyslexia. Oct 2020;70(3):369-78. 
10. “E.E. Cummings.” Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E.E.Cummings
11. Schultheiss D, Jonas U. The portrait of James Israel by the German impressionist Max Liebermann: a selected pictorial view on the early twentieth century development of surgical urology in Berlin. World J Urol. 2001 Nov;19(5):383-7.
12. Ohry A. Medical portraits of Max Liebermann. Hektoen International. Fall 2024. hekint.org/2024/11/07/medical-portraits-of-max-liebermann/
13. Ohry A. On Two Painters and Eleven Doctors. Medicina Internacia Revuo. Aug 17, 2018;28(110):47-4.
14. Fawaz R, Sellier A, Beucler N, Lozouet M, Delmas JM, Desse N, Dagain A. The Origin of Surrealism: Rethinking Apollinaire’s Penetrating Brain Injury with Current Knowledge Regarding White Matter Tracts. World Neurosurg. 2023;173:44-7. 
15. Ohry A, Ohry-Kossoy K. Joë Bousquet: paraplegia as a poet’s plight and challenge. Paraplegia. 1988;26(4):273-7.