Marie Depage

Marie Pauline Depage (1872 to 1915) was a Belgian nurse and the wife of Antoine Depage, the royal surgeon and founder of the Belgian Red Cross. Born Marie Picard in Ixelles near Brussels, she married in 1893 and took on the administrative work of the Berkendael Medical Institute, a non-denominational nursing school founded in 1907 with Edith Cavell as head nurse. She helped send Belgian ambulances to the Balkans during the First Balkan War, and after the First World War began she volunteered at the Red Cross hospital in the Royal Palace in Brussels and helped convert a hotel at De Panne into a military hospital. In 1915 she raised money for that hospital in the United States, and on the voyage home she died in the sinking of the RMS Lusitania after helping other passengers into lifeboats. She is commemorated in Belgium alongside Edith Cavell.