Josephine Beatrice Bowman

Josephine Beatrice Bowman (1881 to 1971) was the third superintendent of the United States Navy Nurse Corps. Born in Des Moines, Iowa, she graduated from nurse training in Philadelphia in 1904, joined the American Red Cross Nursing Service and took part in its first disaster relief operation after a tornado near Hattiesburg, Mississippi in 1908. That October she became one of the first twenty members of the new Navy Nurse Corps, known as the Sacred Twenty. She nursed war casualties in Britain in 1914 and 1915, taught midwifery and practical nursing to Chamorro women in Guam in 1916, led nursing at the Great Lakes Naval Hospital through the 1918 influenza epidemic, and in 1919 led the first Navy nurses to serve at sea aboard the hospital ship USS Relief. As superintendent from December 1922 until her retirement in 1935 she worked to recruit nurses, improve pay and uniforms, win military status and encourage postgraduate education. She is buried at Arlington National Cemetery.