“A gifted leader, educator, and administrator, Edith Catherine Rayside helped shape Canadian military nursing during the First World War and the nursing profession that emerged in its aftermath.” When Edith Catherine Rayside enlisted in the Canadian Army Medical Corps in February 1916, she brought with her nearly fifteen years of nursing experience, a university education, […]

Born in Souris, Prince Edward Island, on 14 June 1880, Rena Maude MacLean graduated from the Rhode Island Hospital School of Nursing in 1908. She enlisted in the Canadian Army Medical Corps as a Nursing Sister at Quebec City on 28 September 1914, becoming one of the earliest Canadian nursing officers to volunteer for overseas […]

Margaret Isobel Bartlett was born on May 5, 1918, in Dunnville, Ontario, to parents May and Herbert Bartlett. She was raised along with her older brother Harry on a large dairy farm where by age five she was responsible for feeding the chickens and collecting the eggs. At age 18 she started nursing school at […]

When Canadians think of military nursing during the twentieth century, they usually picture the Nursing Sisters of the First and Second World Wars. For more than sixty years, however, commissioned Nursing Officers in Canada’s military were exclusively women. That changed in November 1967, when the Canadian Armed Forces commissioned Lieutenant Roy D. Field as the first male Nursing […]