Dita Hopkins Kinney (September 13, 1855 — April 16, 1921) was the first superintendent of the

United States Army Nurse Corps The United States Army Nurse Corps (USANC) was formally established by the U.S. Congress in 1901. It is one of the six medical special branches (or "corps") of officers which – along with medical enlisted soldiers – comprise the Army Medical ...

, serving from 1901 to 1909.

Early life

Dita Hopkins was born in New York City and raised in California, the daughter of C. T. Hopkins and Myra Burnett Hopkins. She attended

Mills College Mills College at Northeastern University is a private college in Oakland, California and part of Northeastern University's global university system. Mills College was founded as the Young Ladies Seminary in 1852 in Benicia, California; it was ...

. As a young widow, she trained as a nurse at

Massachusetts General Hospital Massachusetts General Hospital (Mass General or MGH) is the original and largest teaching hospital of Harvard Medical School located in the West End neighborhood of Boston, Massachusetts. It is the third oldest general hospital in the United Stat ...

.Mary T. Sarnecky
"Mrs. Dita H. Kinney:1st Superintendent, Army Nurse Corps"
Army Nurse Corps Association.

Career

Kinney worked as a nurse in Massachusetts, Minnesota, and California, before she became an army nurse in 1898. She was first assigned to the hospital at the

Presidio of San Francisco The Presidio of San Francisco (originally, El Presidio Real de San Francisco or The Royal Fortress of Saint Francis) is a park and former U.S. Army post on the northern tip of the San Francisco Peninsula in San Francisco, California, and is part o ...

. She also worked with tubercular patients at Fort Bayard, New Mexico. In 1901, she became superintendent of the United States Army Nursing Corps. In that year, she was called "perhaps the most conspicuous woman in the nursing profession today". Her work included lecture and inspection tours of army hospitals in the United States and abroad. She resigned the superintendency in 1909. Kinney left active nursing for health reasons in 1914, but taught

American Red Cross The American Red Cross (ARC), also known as the American National Red Cross, is a non-profit humanitarian organization that provides emergency assistance, disaster relief, and disaster preparedness education in the United States. It is the desi ...

nurses during

World War I World War I (28 July 1914 11 November 1918), often abbreviated as WWI, was one of the deadliest global conflicts in history. Belligerents included much of Europe, the Russian Empire, the United States, and the Ottoman Empire, with fightin ...

Personal life

Dita Hopkins married Mark Kinney in 1874,"Woman's World"
''Portsmouth Herald'' (January 9, 1902): 3. via

Newspapers.com Ancestry.com LLC is an American genealogy company based in Lehi, Utah. The largest for-profit genealogy company in the world, it operates a network of genealogical, historical records, and related genetic genealogy websites. In November 2018, ...

and had one son before she was widowed in 1878. She died in 1921, aged 65 years, in

Bangor, Maine Bangor ( ) is a city in the U.S. state of Maine and the county seat of Penobscot County. The city proper has a population of 31,753, making it the state's 3rd-largest settlement, behind Portland (68,408) and Lewiston (37,121). Modern Bangor ...

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Kinney, Dita Hopkins 1855 births 1921 deaths American nurses American women nurses American women in World War I People from New York City 20th-century American people