Vera Brittain

Vera Mary Brittain was an English nurse, writer, feminist, socialist and pacifist, born in 1893 and died in 1970. She served as a Voluntary Aid Detachment nurse, a volunteer nursing role, during the First World War, and her experiences of that war are the subject of her best-selling 1933 memoir Testament of Youth. The book also traces the beginning of her journey toward pacifism. Her place in the record of medicine is that of a wartime nurse whose firsthand account of her experience reached a wide readership, rather than that of a clinician or researcher.