Remembrance Day may have passed, but I don’t believe we should limit reflecting on the sacrifices made by our citizens in past wars to only one single day of the year.
While most of the time we focus our attention on those men serving at the ‘tip of the spear’ in combat, today I’d like to highlight a remarkable woman who served behind the lines in a military hospital.
During the First World War, more than 2,800 trained civilian nurses enlisted with the Canadian army. They served in England, France, Greece, Malta, the Dardanelles, Egypt, and Mesopotamia (Iraq). Uniquely among military medical services of the day, every nurse (known as a nursing sister) held an officers' rank in the Canadian Army Medical Corps (CAMC), becoming the first women in the modern world to hold military commissions as officers.
One of these nurses was Bradford resident Myra Wood.
Born June 28, 1887, to Robert and Jane Wood, Myra learned about handwork growing up on a farm that had been in the family for five decades. She also excelled in school and was very bright. No one was surprised when she elected to go to Toronto to pursue a career in nursing. Myra was still pursuing her studies when her father died suddenly in 1908. This loss seemed to have redoubled her commitment to aiding those who were ill, a drive that would push her to extremes in the years to come.
In the later summer of 1914, war erupted. When by the following spring it became clear that this war would last years and the casualties would soar beyond anything previously imaginable, Myra, by now a professional nurse, joined the CAMC on April 7, 1915.
For a year starting in February 1915, the British attempted to force the Ottoman Empire out of the war with an offensive in the Dardanelles. What was planned as a quick campaign became a bloody stalemate. A military hospital was set up on the Greek island of Lemnos to deal with the thousands of casualties. It was here that Myra was posted.
Doctors and nurses struggled to provide care in conditions that were far from ideal. Overcrowding, inadequate water supply, food that was ‘scanty and of poor quality’, and dust and flies that covered everything challenged even the best medical professionals. Dysentery, owing to poor water sanitation, was rampant.
Nursing sisters were hardly immune. Myra certainly wasn’t and she quickly caught dysentery. She should have been in bed resting, but instead pushed herself to perform her duties. Doctors diagnosed her with extreme fatigue but, again, she refused rest. By year’s end, Myra had lost 20 pounds and only then, and reluctantly, did she agree to a period of recuperation.
This began a pattern for her wartime service. Myra would work herself to the point of illness and exhaustion, consistently refuse to seek treatment and then finally, and only when ordered to do so, would she agree to medical leave. At times she was in great pain and feverish. Never mind; wounded men needed her. Myra seemed obsessively driven.
In 1919, the war over, Myra returned to Canada where it was determined she was suffering from an inflamed appendix and gall bladder infection. Myra would spend six months as a patient at St. Andrews Military Hospital in Toronto. As such, she wasn’t discharged until 1920, a year and a half after the guns had fallen silent.
Finally healthy, Myra returned to Bradford and served as a nurse here, showing the same devotion to civilian patients as she did to military ones. She died March 20, 1960, and was buried in Coulson’s Hill Cemetery.
Myra Wood had never been in battle, but nonetheless displayed remarkable bravery and devotion while going above and beyond the call of duty.
