Reserve Nurse US Army Elinor Delight Gregg

Born: May 31, 1886, Colorado Springs, CO.
Death: March 31, 1970, Santa Fe. NM

At the outbreak of the First World War Elinor Delight Gregg became a Red Cross nurse and later a member of the United States Army Nursing Corps. She served for two years with active field service on both the French and British fronts. She was discharged from the Nursing Corps in 1919. Her service in World War I was the beginning of a life of service in a variety of ways. After the war she became involved in public health administration, working for the Bureau of Indian Affairs as supervisor of nurses until her retirement in 1939.  During World War II she performed volunteer Red Cross work at St, Vincent’s Hospital in Santa Fe, New Mexico. ¹

Gregg, the sixth of seven children, was born in Colorado Springs, Colorado where her father, a minister, had been assigned to the First Congregational Church. She moved to Waltham, Massachusetts in 1911 for nursing training at the Waltham Training School for Nurses. For the next several years she worked as an industrial nurse before continuing graduate study in institutional management at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. ² During World War I she joined the Red Cross, which had been made the reservoir of the Army and Navy Nurse Corps in 1905.  Consequently, she later became a member of the United States Army Nursing Corps. ³

Gregg was originally assigned to Base Hospital No. 5 (Peter Bent Brigham Hospital) in Boston. By August 1917 she was working in the hospital at Dannes Camiers. ⁴ Base Hospital No. 5 had been assigned to the British Expeditionary Force in France and assumed operations of British General Hospital No. 11. ⁵ Elinor wrote to her brother Alan’s biographer Wilder Penfield that she had gone across in May 1917. In that letter she reported she had been night supervisor for the month of November, with responsibility for about 2,000 beds. In January 1918 they moved into an old casino in Boulogne-sur-Mer. The casino was more comfortable but also more dangerous because of its location across from the quay. Her patients there were primarily burned and gassed soldiers.⁶ After her initial assignment she was attached to a mobile hospital, moving from location to location. She explained in a letter to her sister-in-law Barbara,

You see we have American leave in point of time but we travel on British movement orders and may go anywhere in France except the country where the American soldiers are on leave and into the War Zone. Now that Paris is in the War Zone we may be stopped on Paris leave. However, that does not prevent my having been there 48 hours already. You are always glad of any inch of joy that the government lets slip out inadvertently… ⁷

According to a table put together by Jacqueline Pflaum Elinor Gregg was in the following locations in France during the War:

Throughout the war Gregg served as both a head nurse and a night supervisor in Base Hospital No. 5. Efficiency reports from the period June 1917 through 1918 indicated that her duties were described as good or exceptional. ⁹ Although she apparently said little about her feelings about the war, in a letter to her niece Alice Bemis dated 9 September 1918 she described her experiences and daily routine, commenting “There is certainly plenty that goes on here abouts – I love it every minute.” ¹⁰

After her return to the United States and discharge from the army in 1919 she wrote:

After the First World War, I came home from Base Hospital 5 in France realizing that I must decide what kind of Nursing I wanted to spend the rest of my life doing. I had tried industrial nursing, training school supervising and hospital management and none of them really excited me. ¹¹

During her first year after returning from the war Gregg traveled throughout the Midwest and Southwest as a lecturer on the Chautauqua circuit for the Red Cross. She gave speeches about her war experiences and on public health topics. She then turned to public health nursing by taking a course at Simmons College in Boston and then working as a home nurse in rural New Hampshire. In 1922 she re-joined the Red Cross as a public health nurse on the Rosebud and Pine Ridge reservations in South Dakota. This was the beginning of her career and life interest in Native Americans and public-health nursing. ¹²

Convinced that medical conditions were so bad on reservations that it was necessary to have greater support than what she had experienced with those two assignments she left the Red Cross in 1924 to become the first supervisor of Public Health Nursing for the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA). In this position her main task was to recruit nurses for the service, which she did effectively for the following 12 years. Her achievements included establishing qualifications for public health nurses, developing a course for training for nurse attendants, outlining proposals for new hospitals on the reservations, helping introduce health education programs and the use of vitamins to the reservations, and publicizing the plight of the Indians. ¹³

Throughout her career she worked to support Native Americans and their culture. She opposed the establishment of a birth-control program on reservations and refused to implement it, arguing it was contrary to their culture. In 1935 she made a field trip to Alaska to visit many of the nurses as well as checking on the health of the Indians and Eskimos. Traveling to and within Alaska by boat, plain, and dogsled, this ended up being her last trip for the BIA. ¹⁴

She chronicled the events of her trip in her book The Indians and the Nurse. The trip was extremely grueling and what she learned was the inadequacies of the health care being provided in Alaska. While she concluded that some deficiencies could be attributed to lack of organization and distance from Washington D.C., she also found inadequate facilities and medical personnel. The physical demands of this trip and frustration from the amount of red tape developing within the agency influenced her to accept her sister Faith Bemis’s offer of financial assistance that would furnish Gregg with sufficient income to retire. She retired from the BIA in 1938. ¹⁵

Following her retirement at age 53 Gregg’s transition to civilian life extended over several months, visiting and caring for several family members and working briefly as a camp nurse in the Perry Mansfield Camp in Steamboat Springs, Colorado. She eventually made her way to Santa Fe where she moved into her new house built by Jon Gaw Meem, a renowned New Mexico architect and her niece’s husband. ¹⁶

With the outbreak of the Second World War, Gregg wanted to support the war effort by taking in children being evacuated from England to protect them from bombings. Along with her niece Faith, Gregg brothers Michael and Stuart, aged 14 Cooke, aged 10 and 14, while her niece took their four sisters. In her biography of Gregg Jacqueline Pflaum describes the great extent to which Elinor embraced having the boys with her, giving them emotional and physical support, making sure they were active and engaged in their lives in Santa Fe. In interviews both Michael and Stuart remember being very happy during their time with Elinor. The three of them developed a relationship that continued until her death in 1970. ¹⁷

Gregg’s retirement also involved volunteer activities. She was very involved with the Maternal Health Center in Santa Fe, continuing her involvement with the clinic well into the 1960s. She was also involved in the Santa Fe Girl Scout Council, lending her leadership skills to the group for more than fifteen years. She headed several committees and, during World War II and after, arranged a variety of activities supporting the war, post war, and cold war efforts. ¹⁸

In the late 1950s she acted on her brother’s suggestion that she write a book about her experiences with the Indian Service. The book The Indians and the Nurse was published by the University of Oklahoma Press in 1965. That same year she moved in with her niece Faith and her husband John and then later into the apartment next door with a nurse to look after her. She spent the final weeks of her life in a nursing home and died in the hospital of kidney failure on March 31, 1970, at the age of 83. ¹⁹

Gregg was described by friends and family as forthright, perhaps to the extent of outspokenness, but with a sense of humor and nonjudgmental. Although she enjoyed good health, she started cigarette smoking at the age of fifty and from then on was a chain smoker who always had a cigarette in her hand. She was described by her family as the person to whom people turned in times of crisis, fulfilling the role of professional aunt and sister of mercy for the extended Gregg family. ²⁰

Images & Documents

1. Obituary, The Santa Fe New Mexican (Santa Fe, New Mexico): 1 April 1970, page 2. Newspapers.com.
2. Bullough, Vern L.; Church, Olga Maranjian; Stein, Alice P. American nursing: a biographical dictionary, 154, 155
3. Pflaum, Jacqueline. Helper woman: a biography of Elinor Delight Gregg.52, 53
4. Ibid. 58
5. Brookfield Institute, https://brookfieldinstitute.org/news/2018/6/18/fascinating-wwi-account-by-nurse-from-holyoke accessed 6/18/2023.
6. Elinor Gregg to Wilder Penfield, ALS, n.d., Elinor Gregg Papers, Box 1, Santa Fe, New Mexico in Pflaum 58, 59
7. Elinor Gregg to Barbara Gregg, ALS, 1918, Elinor Gregg Papers, Box 1, Santa Fe, New Mexico in Pflaum 60, 61
8. Medical Department, Base Hospital No. 5, “Station List of Unit since Arrival in the American E .F .,” TD, n.d., WWI RG120, Box 210, World War I Organization Records, National Archives, Washington, D. in Pflaum 61
9. Pflaum 61, 62
10. Elinor Gregg to Alice Bemis, ALS, 9 September 1918, Elinor Gregg Papers, Box 1, Santa Fe, New Mexico in Pflaum 62
11. Elinor D. Gregg, The Indians and the Nurse (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1965), 3 in Pflaum 63
12. Ibid. 155
13. Ibid.
14. Ibid. 156
15. Pflaum, Jacqueline. 149-153
16. Ibid. 164-166
17. Ibid. 164-175
18. Ibid. 176-179
19. Ibid. 194-196
20. Pflaum,183-186

Other Sources:

Guide to the Elinor Delight Gregg Video, 1936 at Archives and Special Collections, UAA/APP Consortium Library: https://archives.consortiumlibrary.org/collections/specialcollections/hmc-0424/

Alaska Digital Archives, “A Public Health Nurse in Alaska” https://vilda.alaska.edu/digital/collection/cdmg13/id/23067/rec/1  (Elinor Delight Gregg video, Archives and Special Collections, Consortium Library, University of Alaska Anchorage)

“A Public Health Nurse in Alaska” (1936): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z1ZJJ42grGM

Pflaum, Jacqueline S. DNSc, MPH, MS, “Helper Woman: A Biography of Elinor Delight Gregg” (1996). (https://digital.sandiego.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1272&context=dissertations)

McConnell, Edwina and Teddy Jones. A Stone for Every Journey: Traveling the Life of Elinor Gregg, R. N. Santa Fe: Sunstone Press, 2005. (https://books.google.com/books?id=1UGjfcK3y8MC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false)

Gregg, Elinor D. The Indians and the Nurse. Oklahoma City: University of Oklahoma Press, 1965. (https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Indians_and_the_Nurse.html?id=CrURzwEACAAJ)

Gregg, Elinor D. “The Nursing Service of the Indian Bureau” The American Journal of Nursing, Aug. 1925, Vol. 25, No. 8 (Aug. 1925). pp. 643-645. https://doi.org/10.2307/341298

Gregg, Elinor. D. “A federal Nursing Service above the Arctic Circle” The American Journal of Nursing, Vol 36, No 2 (Feb. 1936), pp. 128-134. https://doi.org/10.2307/341298

Bullough, Vern L.; Church, Olga Maranjian; Stein, Alice P. American nursing: a biographical dictionary. New York: Garland. 1988. Accessed on Archive.org: https://archive.org/details/americannursingb0000unse/page/154/mode/2up.

 Obituary, The Santa Fe New Mexican (Santa Fe, New Mexico): 1 April 1970, page 2.

 Pflaum, Jacqueline S. DNSc, MPH, MS, “Helper Woman: A Biography of Elinor Delight Gregg” (1996). Dissertations. 269. https://digital.sandiego.edu/dissertations/269

Featured Image:

American National Red Cross – https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2017669464/

Prepared by Sue Taylor. PhD, Central New Mexico Community College.

DVA, Veterans Legacy Memorial