Try as she might, Mary Gladwin couldn’t forget the sights and sounds of war.
She saw blood-soaked soldiers, writhing on squalid floors, crying and pleading for help. She heard the low thud of exploding artillery and felt makeshift hospitals shudder and moan.
The Red Cross nurse set aside fatigue and fear while providing comfort to wounded troops in a world gone mad.
“I have seen it all,” Gladwin once lamented. “If the fathers and mothers could have seen what I have seen on the bloody battlefields, there never would be another war.”
Akron’s angel of mercy received prestigious awards for her service to humanity, but the one badge she wore the most was a simple pin bearing a red cross. Mary Gladwin Hall, home of the University of Akron’s College of Nursing, is a lasting tribute to a caring soul.
A native of England, Gladwin was born in late 1861 in Stoke-upon-Trent, Staffordshire, the eldest of Francis and Sarah Gladwin’s seven children. In 1868, the family settled in Akron, where Gladwin grew up in a home at 268 E. Voris St. and attended Jennings School off East Mill Street downtown.
Slender and petite, the blue-eyed, brown-haired girl earned a scholarship to study education at Buchtel College, forerunner of the University of Akron, where she graduated in 1887.
Gladwin taught high school science for six years in Norwalk until she began to second-guess her career. She labored over her class lessons and often felt tired and listless.
“I wasn’t ill,” she later recalled. “I was just run-down. Didn’t sleep well. Losing weight.”
The schoolmarm went to see a doctor who bluntly told her: “Get your head out of that book or you’ll die.”
Nursing sounded interesting, so she applied to Boston City Hospital. Nine months into her studies, the Spanish-American War exploded in 1898 and the American Red Cross recruited volunteers. Gladwin found herself tending to typhoid-stricken soldiers as chief nurse at a 750-bed tent hospital in Georgia.
From there, she went to Cuba, then Puerto Rico and finally the Philippines, helping with wounded troops. In Manila, she was put in charge of Red Cross supplies. For her service, she received the Spanish-American War Medal.
Gladwin returned to Boston to complete her nursing degree in 1904, only to be drawn into global events again after the Russo-Japanese War erupted. The Red Cross sent her to Hiroshima, where she assisted Japanese nurses.
“We can conceive of no greater privilege than to be allowed to work quietly side by side with them in the care of those whose need is so bitter and in who their brave suffering have become to us as brothers,” she wrote. “All of our hearts have gone out to great Japan in her gallant struggle for liberty.”
For her service, she received the Imperial Order of the Crown, presented in person by Japanese Emperor Meiji. She also received a medal made from battlefield shrapnel.
Gladwin returned to Akron and served as nurse at B.F. Goodrich and provided Red Cross relief for victims during the infamous flood of 1913.
When World War I began in 1914, she went to Serbia to organize relief efforts. Gladwin attended to thousands of wounded soldiers at a besieged hospital in Belgrade.
Twice the hospital was captured by Austrians and once recaptured by Serbs. For more than a year, the city was bombarded. Shelling became so frequent that it just became background noise.
War casualties filled the corridors, crying for assistance while white-uniformed nurses worked all day and night. The atmosphere was horrifying.
“There was a ward next to mine, with a door leading directly into it,” Gladwin wrote. “I could hear every sound in it and I used to tumble into bed at two or three o’clock in the morning and hear those men in the ward. They begged and prayed in all languages for help. They swore, they tore their bandages and the nights when I got up (it took all my strength of mind to stay in bed), I knew exactly what I would find when I went in — the men in their agony tearing off their dressings, the dark streams of blood on the floor.”
Prince Alexander of Yugoslavia decorated Gladwin with the Serbian Cross of Charity for her service.
Returning to Akron, she helped organized the Summit County chapter of the American Red Cross and the Visiting Nurses’ Association.
In 1920, Gladwin became one of the first nurses to receive the International Red Cross’ Florence Nightingale Medal, the most prestigious award in her field, “for great and exceptional devotion to the sick and wounded in peace or war.”
She kept her medals in their cases and stuffed them in a drawer at her Voris Street home, but continued to wear her Red Cross button. Gladwin never married or had children. Her life was dedicated to being a “Red Crosser.”
She received an honorary doctor of laws degree from the University of Akron, served as a hospital administrator in New York and Minnesota, went on the national lecture circuit and wrote two books: Ethics for Nurses (1930) and The Red Cross and Jane Arminda Delano (1931).
She also became an outspoken advocate for peace.
“War will end when youth are taught what war really means,” she told the Beacon Journal. “It is the conflict of the greedy.”
Gladwin believed civilization was threatened by “the selfish greed of ambitious politicians” who would rather go to battle than resolve their differences at a conference table.
“If the statesmen and diplomats fail to end wars, the scientists will,” she warned in 1929. “Let us hope the time will never come when war’s ending will depend on scientists.”
With scientific knowledge run amok, entire nations could be swept away, she predicted.
“It’s awful to think about it,” Gladwin said.
As World War II inflamed Europe in 1939, Gladwin’s health slipped away. She entered City Hospital for a rest, but her weakened heart gave out and she passed away in her sleep at age 77.
Hundreds of nurses, civic leaders and Red Cross members packed St. Paul’s Episcopal Church for the simple funeral. She was laid to rest at the Gladwin family plot in Glendale Cemetery.
In 1979, the University of Akron dedicated Mary Gladwin Hall as its new home for the College of Nursing. Her diary, photos and other writings are stored at UA Archival Services. Gladwin’s medals were donated to the Summit County Historical Society.
Her one last wish was to see an end to war. It didn’t happen in her lifetime — or in ours.
“Nobody who has seen as much of its horror as I have could feel otherwise about it,” Gladwin said. “I hope that there will not be any more. They get worse and worse as time goes on.”
Copy editor Mark J. Price is author of The Rest Is History: True Tales From Akron’s Vibrant Past, a book from the University of Akron Press. He can be reached at 330-996-3850 or mjprice@thebeaconjournal.com.