Amelia Greenwald

Amelia Greenwald (March 1, 1881 – January 1, 1966) was an American public health nurse. She worked in France and Germany during and after World War I, and founded the Jewish Nurses' Training School in Warsaw in 1923.

Early life and education Greenwald was born in Gainesville, Alabama, the youngest of the eight surviving children of Joseph Greenwald and Elisha (or Elise) Haas Greenwald. Her family was Jewish. Her father was a grain dealer, and served as mayor of Gainesville. Against her prominent family's wishes, she earned her nursing degree at the Touro Infirmary Training School for Nurses in New Orleans in 1908, with further studies at Johns Hopkins University and Teachers College, Columbia University. She also studied with Henrietta Szold in New York City.

Career

In the United States Greenwald helped establish the Pensacola Sanitarium in 1909. In 1916 she was director of the New Jersey Public Health Association. The program addressed rural women's health broadly, including English lessons, a resource library, and hygiene classes.

In Europe During World War I, Greenwald went to France with the American Red Cross, and worked in hospitals at Verdun and Savoy, as well as in Koblenz in Germany. funded in part by American Jewish organizations. "There is no force in Poland which will act as an agency for good as will this group of girls who are going into homes, spreading knowledge and raising the standards of the people", she said in 1927, of the Polish nurses her school trained. She also held the first Polish driver's license issued to a woman, and is said to have introduced iced tea to Polish women. She was a member of the American Legion.

Personal life In 1939, Greenwald adopted a teenaged German cousin, Liselotte Levy. She died from cancer in 1966, at the age of 84, in Eunice.