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Reviewed by:
  • She Answered Every Call: The Life of Public Health Nurse Mona Gordon Wilson (1894–1981)
  • Ada Romaine-Davis
Douglas O. Baldwin. She Answered Every Call: The Life of Public Health Nurse Mona Gordon Wilson (1894–1981). Charlottetown, P.E.I., Canada: Indigo Press, 1997. xx + 318 pp. Ill. $21.95 (paperbound).

This scholarly and absorbing biography portrays a truly remarkable woman, whose life was devoted to improving the health of people, wherever she was. Born [End Page 165] in Toronto, the third of seven children of Harold and Elizabeth Wilson, she graduated from Havergal Ladies’ College in 1912. Nursing did not attract her until the start of World War I in August 1914, when she applied to the Johns Hopkins Hospital School of Nursing; she entered the school in March 1915. Although she found the constraints imposed on students irksome, her performance was exceptional from the beginning. Her instructors commended her “industry, reliability . . . patience, [and] kindness” (p. 30). In her senior year, she was one of a small group selected to receive special training in executive and administrative work, in which she earned the highest average, and was praised for her “marked executive ability” (p. 45).

After graduating in 1918, Wilson enlisted in the American Red Cross to serve overseas in the war effort, and sailed for France in the fall. She was assigned to base hospitals in France, then relief work in Siberia, Albania, and Italy. She became expert in administration, the acquisition and distribution of resources, and caring for large groups of people—assets needed throughout her career. Conditions everywhere were wretched, with hundreds of refugees fleeing the ravages of war, having lost homes and family. Among the awards she received during this time were the Foreign Service Certificate, the Red Cross Service Certificate, a gold medallion from the Italian Red Cross, and the Order of the Day from the White Russian refugees in Ragusa.

In 1923, Wilson was assigned as the Red Cross Chief Nurse to the small Canadian province of Prince Edward Island, where for thirty years—except for an assignment to Newfoundland as the Red Cross Commissioner during World War II, to organize and provide care for shipwrecked sailors and soldiers in the North Atlantic Run—she developed and implemented various health programs. On first arriving in Prince Edward Island, she was dismayed at the people’s poor general health. She immediately established mobile clinics, began health education classes for all age groups, and focused attention on children by providing immunizations and systematic school inspections. A major accomplishment was her lobbying of the government to develop a Department of Public Health and a Department of Nutrition, to bring the Island into the mainstream of Canada’s health system.

The author of Mona Wilson’s biography is a noted Canadian historian whose research has focused on medical, banking, women’s, and urban history. He depicts in detail the political, social, and economic context of the countries where Mona worked, and the significant individuals in her life, many of whom were classmates. (In a 1995 article, Baldwin wrote about Mona’s years at Johns Hopkins Hospital School of Nursing and the development of networking and female support groups that began there, which played such an important role throughout her life.) 1 He maintains a continuing thread throughout regarding Mona’s tireless energy, toughness, and singleminded determination—as seen, for example, in one situation where the tires of the Red Cross car gave out: she [End Page 166] stuffed them with straw and drove on. These characteristics provided ample justification for the many awards that she received during her lifetime. In 1967, for example, she was one of only nine recipients of the prestigious Florence Nightingale Award. She is credited with organizing health-care delivery and thus with greatly improving the health status of the entire population of Prince Edward Island. She did, indeed, answer every call.

Ada Romaine-Davis
Johns Hopkins University

Footnotes

1. Douglas O. Baldwin, “Discipline, Obedience, and Female Support Groups: Mona Wilson at the Johns Hopkins Hospital School of Nursing, 1915–1918,” Bull. Hist. Med., 1995, 69: 599–619.

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