Cordelia E. Cook

Cordelia Elizabeth "Betty" Cook (1919 to 1996) was an American combat nurse in the United States Army Nurse Corps during World War II. Born in Fort Thomas, Kentucky, she graduated from the Christ Hospital School of Nursing in Cincinnati in 1940, worked a year at that hospital and then enlisted in the Army Nurse Corps as a surgical nurse, eventually reaching the rank of lieutenant colonel. She served in North Africa, followed the medical units that came after the invasion of Sicily in 1943 and moved with Allied forces into mainland Italy. In 1944 she was assigned to the 11th Field Hospital near the front at Presenzano, where she received the Bronze Star Medal and, after being wounded by shrapnel when the hospital was bombed, a Purple Heart; she was the first woman to receive both. After the war she nursed for 28 years at Doctors Hospital North in Columbus, Ohio.