Agnes von Kurowsky

Agnes von Kurowsky (1892 to 1984) was an American nurse who trained at the Bellevue nursing program in New York City, graduated in 1917 and joined the American Red Cross, sailing for Europe in June 1918. She served at an army hospital in Milan during the First World War, where one of her patients was the young Ernest Hemingway. She is remembered mainly because he based the nurse Catherine Barkley in A Farewell to Arms on her, though that link was not widely known until his brother published a memoir in 1961. Her own career was longer than that episode: after Milan the Red Cross sent her to Romania for two years, and she later served in Haiti as director of nurses for the country's Public Health Service. During the Second World War she worked at the Red Cross Blood Bank in New York City. She was honored for her services with the Red Cross in the First World War and is buried in Washington, D.C.