Miss Jane Arminda Delano

Miss Jane Arminda Delano was born in 1862 in New York, the daughter of George and Mary Ann Wright Delano.  She decided to become a trained nurse as a young woman, and graduated for the Bellevue Training School in 1886.  In 1908 she founded and became the president of the Board of Directors of the American Journal of Nursing, and in 1909 she accepted the chairmanship of the American Red Cross Nursing Service and the superintendency of the Army Nurse Corps. She served in the surgeon general’s office until March of 1912 when she resigned to devote all of her energies to the American Red Cross. Much of the credit for recruiting of the majority of the 21, 480 Army nurses who served during World War I can be ascribed to Delano. After the war she traveled to Europe to visit the nurses she had enrolled, but fell ill while there, and died on April 15, 1919 in France.  In 1920 her body was exhumed and returned to the United State to be buried in Arlington National Cemetery.