Emily Morgan (nurse)

Emily Morgan was an American nurse born in Kansas in 1878 and known as the Angel of the Yukon. Trained as a registered nurse and a public health nurse by the American Red Cross in Wichita, she became the first public health nurse in that city. She served with the Army Reserve Nurses Corps in the First World War in France, Germany, Italy, Belgium, England and Australia, and she did missionary nursing in Panama and India. The Red Cross sent her to Alaska in 1923, where she was in charge of Maynard Columbus Hospital in Nome and was the nurse who administered the serum during the diphtheria epidemic of 1925. She was later recalled to Nome to help fight smallpox, and she ran the hospital at Barrow when the bodies of Wiley Post and Will Rogers were brought in after their 1935 plane crash. In the Second World War she nursed in New Zealand. She died in Kansas in 1960 at the age of 82.