Nurses of the Great War: exhibition-event in Meaux

Louise Ibels is from an artist’s family. She learns pictorial techniques with her mother, her half-brother is the Nabi painter Henri-Gabriel Ibels. She practices poetry, drawing or engraving (on wood, aquatint and strong water) and exhibits in several salons. During the war, Louise Ibels illustrates the pages of the newspaper The Bayonet like Élisabeth Branly or Gerda Wegener, other female artists. In this series of 20 prints published in an album entitled "A Day in the Hospital", she tells with a great sense of observation and a lot of humor, the daily life of nurses in an auxiliary hospital.

Olga Bing. What we know about Olga Bing is known to us by the preface of the album written by art critic Louis Vauxcelles: she was a painter before being a nurse in a Parisian hospital. This is confirmed by the precision in the representation of the various technical gestures and care performed by the nurses presented in the 25 sketches of the album "Gestures of nurses". Care, dressings, suction cups, stings or samples, toilets are shown with a desire for realism far from conventional iconography. Published in March 1917, this album was sold to the Brotherhood of Artists.

The wounded of tuberculosis. Tuberculosis is a disease considered shameful because its spread, as well as venereal diseases or alcoholism, is considered favored by social conditions (poverty, unhealthy housing, promiscuity, etc.). Tuberculosis mortality increased in the armies during the war and at the end of 1915, it was proven that the presence of tuberculosis carries a major risk of weakening of the numbers. From then on, the health authorities mobilized to put in place a real anti-tuberculosis armament. Tuberculosis health stations are created to welcome and isolate the sick. The staff are specialized nurses, often less well regarded than those caring for the injured. The title of the poster: The wounded of tuberculosis, recalls that TB patients are also victims of the conflict.

Pierre-Albert Leroux. The nurse continues to inspire the illustrators, artists and authors who stage or celebrate her in numerous iconographic or literary works, in the press or on postcards. The painter Pierre-Albert Leroux uses in this work the classic image of the nurse as a "white angel", devoted and competent whose pure silhouette, haloed of the veil and leaning on the wounded who washes, belly, assists those who suffer, even accompanies the last moments of the one who dies from his wounds.

Nurse outfit for little girl. In the speeches of patriotic mobilization forged for the little girls, the nurse is presented as an example to follow and they must prove worthy of their elders who are in the hospitals. The discourse is relayed on many media of the world of childhood: books and periodicals, games and toys or small sets that take the model of the Red Cross nurse. Thus, little girls are encouraged to care for the wounded through their nurse doll or by dressing up with their outfit. This costume sold at Bon Marché includes apron, blouse and blue cape with a Legion of Honor discount.

Sidonie Pocquet, born in 1888 in Beaumont-en-Artois (Pas-de-Calais), is separated from his family, who remained in the north of France occupied by the enemy. In 1915, she volunteered at the Issoudun Mixed Hospital where her brother was treated for war wounds. She then enrolled in 1916 at the Heine-Fould Hospital in Paris to become a professional nurse. Its outfit consists of a very tight white cotton blouse worn over a blue skirt. It is completed by a white apron with the Red Cross badge embroidered on the chest. On top is worn a long cape made in a dark blue cloth. On the left side of the cape is a white crest embroidered with the letters S.B.M. surmounting a red cross. The three tombac buttons are stamped with a cross bordered with the inscription French Red Cross.

Nurse’s booklet from Heine-Fould Hospital by Nurse Sidonie PocquetAt the end of their training, nurses receive an individual booklet with their photograph and service number. Similar to the soldier’s military booklet, the nurse’s booklet indicates the services performed in times of peace as in times of war, the annual exercises performed in a dispensary-school, internships in hospital departments and the opinions of the doctors who supervise them. On the photograph of her nursing booklet,Sidonie wears her cape held by two bands of sheet of the same shade that cross on the chest. The very practical system keeps the cape on the back of the shoulders while offering greater freedom of movement. She posts a headdress and a white veil embroidered with the Red Cross badge that descends past the shoulders. Usually the nurses' veil is dark blue bordered with white for the city and white.

Miss De Gesse. This photograph is from an album made by Colonel Vignal in memory of one of his men, Second Lieutenant Pierre Clerissy, who died in August 1917. He retraces in photographs the course of the war of Clerissy who was treated at the Gauthier hospital in Marseille from late 1916 to March 1917.   In Marseilles, Clerissy rubs shoulders with the nurse-major Mademoiselle de Gesse, whose photograph we discover here, armed and proudly wearing the decorations lent by the wounded of the hospital.