“How terrible, my dear sister, is the power of these men, who pry into the most secret recesses of our hearts, and endeavor to turn our innocent thoughts in such a direction, as to minister to their based ends. And I fear with good reason, that in some instances they have succeeded.”¹“It was hard to take care of those big wards of fifty patients all tucked inside those cotton bed nets, and some of the men would smoke and then burn holes in the nets.” Nurse Bidwell, Panama Canal Zone, 1910.²

French diplomat and engineer, Count Ferdinand de Lesseps arrived in Panama in 1881 to begin construction on a trans-isthmian canal.³ De Lesseps, however, gained no triumph for the French. He never finished digging the “big ditch” to connecting Atlantic and Pacific oceans.⁴ De Lesseps enjoyed success with the construction of the Suez Canal in the 1860s, but his confidence may have undermined his preparedness for the “tropical” environment and diseases of the Isthmus. Financial mismanagement, disease, and natural disasters left the French Canal Company broke by 1889 having sunk more “nearly 300,000,000 on the canal.”⁵ By the time de Lesseps left the Isthmus in the 1890s, “roughly seven thousand of the thirteen thousand [employees were] left stranded by the financial collapse.”⁶ French Canal Company records show over a six -year period between 1883 and 1889, “over 5,000 deaths occurred in the hospital; 1,200 of which were from yellow fever.”⁷ Under the supervision of Ferdinand de Lesseps, staggering death tolls earned de Lesseps the moniker the “pall-bearer of Panama.”⁸

When de Lesseps began construction on the canal in 1881, a company of French-based nuns, the order of the Daughters of Charity of St. Vincent de Paul had already gained a toehold in the region as caretakers of the poor.⁹ The Daughters of Charity, also known as the “Grey Nuns” because of the blueish- grey color of their clothing and their “big white, winged coif…had earned their order the affectionate name ‘God’s geese.’”¹⁰ The Daughters of Charity of St. Vincent de Paul, unlike other religious orders renewed their vows annually prioritizing confraternity in their mission to help the poor.¹¹ Wherever the “far-flung” nuns worked they oversaw alms houses, schools, clinics, hospitals, orphanages, and pharmacies.¹²

Whether in service to the poor or medical science, women’s work in the Canal Zone mattered. From the vantage point of Zone nuns and nurses, any compensation or reward they received did not factor in the challenges they faced navigating environmental obstacles and the risks they took working in the direct path of deadly diseases. Environmental conditions, inside and outside the workplace, and inequitable compensation for their labor dominated the relationships between caretakers and their superiors. Despite the essential services the Daughters of Charity and US-trained nurses provided during Canal construction their stories are still marginalized.

This essay addresses, in part, this sidelining from historical scholarship by piecing together the experiences of nuns and nurses in the Canal Zone from canal reports, government and personal correspondence, and print media. To date, little scholarship singularly focuses on the key role female caretakers played in completion of the Panama Canal in 1914. Patricia Lefevere, in the National Catholic Reporter wrote the history of, “[n]uns’ work has remained largely invisible or been deemed inconsequential.”¹³ Methodologically, this work investigates the lives of nuns and nurses while they coped with significant challenges stemming from work in “tropical” environments and institutionalized inequity. The omission of female narratives from the history of the canal construction begs the question was their work acknowledged? Or were the contributions of nuns and nurses subordinated to male-generated narratives highlighting impressive modernizing schemas? Julie Green recognizes the role civilian nurses played in canal construction in, The Canal Builders: Making America’s Empire at the Panama Canal (2009)¹⁴ while Sioban Nelson’s Say Little, Do Much: Nurses, Nuns, and Hospitals in the Nineteenth Century (2001) explores how “vowed women” (nuns, sisters, deaconesses) a collective identity may have strengthened their success, provided opportunities to demand better wages, work conditions, and housing.¹⁵ Maureen Fitzgerald’s, Habits of Compassion: Irish Catholic Nuns and the Origins of New York’s Welfare System, 1830-1920 outlines a history of charity in conjunction with US immigration, tensions between Protestant and Progressive reformers, and Irish Catholic nuns.¹⁶ My work builds on this existing scholarship by examining the lives of nuns and nurses -as much as possible- apart from the intricacies of canal construction and grand engineer feats.¹⁷

The conditions under which Canal nurses worked, slept, and organized recreational events were created by men and ruled over by men. Changing gender roles of the early twentieth century created an opportunity though for some of the Canal Zone nurses to agitate. For instance, the tensions between nurses and nuns and their male superiors, I argue, are emblematic of wider-reaching social tropes aligning men exclusively with modernity and by extension new developments in industrial agriculture, medicine, public health, and medical technology.

Grandiose hero narratives touting the accomplishments of male “doctors in white” should assume some responsibility for sidelining women’s contributions to the construction of one of the largest, most ambitious, and costly engineering endeavors in US history.¹⁸ Stories extolling the accomplishments of men like US Surgeon General William C. Gorgas have obscured the important role nuns and nurses played in supporting a healthy workforce for a behemoth digging project.¹⁹ Colonel Gorgas’ efforts as Chief Sanitary officer for Zone, eventually curbed the spread of yellow fever and malaria on the isthmus.²⁰ Praise for Gorgas and his accomplishments assumed contours like religious-based faith or hero-worship.²¹ In an editorial for the The Sun , a Zone nurse wrote, “I believe that the general faith in Col. Gorgas is the only thing that keeps any of us on isthmus.”²² The editorial suggests a type of hero-worship for Gorgas had moved beyond the Zone reaching US news outlets. Very few narratives elevate the accomplishments of female caretakers to levels on par with men working in the Canal Zone. Nuns and nurses of the Zone endured what many scientists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries labeled an “insalubrious” “tropical” environment.²³ Understandably, nuns and nurses worried about contracting one of the many deadly “tropical” diseases slithering across the isthmus.

Relationships between the Daughters of Charity, the US Canal Commission, and the Panamanian government changed with the separation of the Isthmus of Panama from Colombia in 1903.²⁴ Religious orders like the Daughters of Charity however held no allegiance to nation-states and so no conflict in continuing their work in Panama and they certainly had no intention of leaving their hospital. As their vows mandated, the Daughters were only bound to the poor, not the French, the US, or the Panamanian government.²⁵ The Daughters of Charity were not alone in thinking the US Canal Commission would supply job security for former employees of the French Canal Company including migrant laborers, engineers, scientists, and physicians. From the standpoint of the US Canal Commission though, the French Catholic nuns did not belong in the Zone. Canal commissioners agreed, the nun “issue” required resolution before US nurses arrived. Disinclined to interfere, Panamanian statesmen left negotiations to the Sister Superior and the Governor of the Canal Zone at the time Major General George Whitefield Davis.²⁶

Correspondence between canal officials and the executive director of Ancón Hospital verify Canal officials and hospital administration urged the nuns to leave all Canal buildings including Ancón Hospital.²⁷ Canal Zone officials complained the Daughters were particularly unruly and often organized strikes demanding more beds and supplies.²⁸ The strikes and demands of the nuns however, carved out new spaces for negotiation between caregivers and their superiors. US nurses arriving in 1904 took advantage of cracks in the wall made by the radical nuns to rally for better pay and working conditions as promised in US government advertisements.

The Canal Commission desperately needed nurses, the nuns had dispersed, some stayed but most left the Zone. Canal digging required access to inexpensive and healthy pools of laborers.²⁹ Hiring nurses helped safeguard the health of laborers and a bonus for the Canal Commission; nurses cost less to hire than doctors. Advertisements for nursing positions in the Canal Zone drew on a young woman’s desire for adventure in exotic lands. Advertisements promised nurse-recruits good pay, clean living quarters, healthy food, and plenty of sunshine.³⁰ Louise C. Bidwell responded to one such advertisement in a DC newspaper and by 1904 she had packed her bags and left on a United Fruit Company steamer for Panama. Bidwell likened Panama to the “wild west” with a flurry of prospectors, investors, migrant laborers that flocked to California during the gold rush of 1848. Seduced by print media advertisements other nurses, like Bidwell, traveled to Panama not fully understanding the hardships they would face, the lure of excitement was too great “[t]the love of adventure is strong in the young, and the pull of the tropics on the native of the north is powerful.”³¹

Most nurses like Bidwell arriving in the Panama Canal Zone worked at Ancón Hospital. When Bidwell and her fellow nurses entered the hospital, they found a hospital packed with 40,000 workmen who rotated in and out daily. Bidwell complained the “boys” in the Zone, showed truly little respect for nurses. In her correspondence home, Bidwell commented how odd she found newspaper headlines from the clippings her family sent. Bidwell knew firsthand the articles declaring yellow fever and malaria under control or eradicated were wrong. Similarly, images of nurses playing sports and enjoying leisure time on wrap-around porch of their fine living quarters did not reflect the reality in which she lived. A reality where having a burro to help haul clothing, water, and other supplies was an absolute necessity. Rain, mud, humidity, and mosquitos presented challenges not expected.³² Nurses in the Zone wrote to the Canal Governor’s office demanding higher pay for a job in which they fell ill often, endured blistering heat and humidity, fought off swarms of hungry, parasite infected mosquitos, one Canal engineer reported to The Times Democrat, “[t]he climate is not good here, but any man with a fair constitution and endowment of nerve can stand it well….”³³ These conditions, they reasoned, merited higher pay. Nurses had every reason to demand more, indeed life in the “tropics” could be perilous for the unacclimated. Pseudoscientific theories asserting the “white race” could not thrive in the “tropics” fortified the nurses’ position on risk. Francis Child Nicholas’ 1903 travel narrative Around the Caribbean and across Panama reinforces the environmental dangers of life in the “tropics,” with descriptions of strange odors emanating from swamps and forests and a “damp heat” that “settles oppressively.”³⁴ Another report from a traveler asserted Panama “. . . is, perhaps, one of the most notoriously unhealthy in the world” and “[m]ental deterioration in the tropics has long been known as a form of exhaustion from which there is recovery upon removal to cooler latitudes.”³⁵ Thomas Wright Jackson, a lecturer on tropical medicine at Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia and Assistant Surgeon for US Volunteers, tried to ready nurses for work in the “tropics.” His advice? The nurses needed “[s]unlight, abundant fresh air, and ventilation.” Jackson’s theory about the importance of sunlight in healing the sick worked at cross purposes with his counsel for blonde-haired people to avoid direct sunlight.³⁶

The nurses of the Zone drew upon racially determinist theories claiming certain “races” flourished in one landscape but withered in another Zone to strengthen their argument about the risks took living and working in the “tropics.” Not swayed by the nurses’ claims, Zone administrators responded with travel restrictions; no nurse could leave the Zone without explicit and documented permission. These new limitations further strained relations between Zone supervisors and nurses. Tense negotiations surfaced when Canal Zone nurses could not convince their superiors to raise salaries. The nurses pressed further underscoring how their daily battles with heat, humidity, rainy seasons, and mosquitoes merited more compensation.³⁷

Indirectly, depictions of nurses in US newspapers did little to endear readers to support their cause. News articles played upon stereotypes of nurses either as saints or defiant “loose” women who refused to conform to gender norms. On one end of the spectrum nurses were in demand and their skills essential. On the other, these articles invalidated and undermined their work in the Zone by focusing on appearance, calling them “ugly” and judging them by a presumed inability to fetch a suitable husband. Other articles emphasized only “young and sturdy” women who wanted “adventure” should apply; “homely” nurses were the best choices as the pretty ones tended to marry too quickly.³⁸

By the time the Panama Canal opened in 1914, the exodus of US nurses was well underway. No longer eager to gain experience, show off skills, many of nurses had their fill of the “exotic” lands and peoples after two years. Nurses who headed home encouraged others to do the same. Two nurses who had spent about a year working in the Canal Zone returned home and reported they were “very glad to be back again.” The nurses told harrowing stories “[t]he supply of nurses... is beginning to fall off and by fall the hospitals will be very short-handed.” According to another passenger on the same ship as the nurses, things were quite bad in the Zone with measles, black measles, smallpox, yellow fever, Chagres fever, and malaria, and there was one case of bubonic plague. The “dead train” the passenger explained “runs from Colon to Monkey Hill Cemetery, a mile and a half south of Colon, always once, and sometimes as often as fourteen times a day.” Interviews with passengers provided more alarming information, there is so much yellow fever about that they keep ten graves always ready for cases of emergency.”³⁹

One year after the Canal opened a special report from the US sanitary Commission in Panama declared, “[t]he habits of the people are in general mostly uncleanly and the sanitary condition is bad. Yellow fever, remittent bilious, and pernicious fevers are endemic.”⁴⁰ Effectively redirecting responsibility for sanitation problems from the US Canal Commission to the Panamanians. Yellow fever continued to menace the Canal Zone and surrounding communities long after construction ended.

The stigma of Panama as a yellow fever-riddled region also endured. Writing in 1919, US-born Methodist missionary George A. Miller’s Prowling About Panama harps on the topic of stagnate air in the “tropics” calling it “terrifying.” After spending an evening with locals working in the Panama Canal Zone he complained with “some primitive prejudice comes a violent dislike of fresh air, especially at night, when every room is as nearly as possible hermetically sealed. In a tropical temperature no one has yet explained how the inmates live till morning.”⁴¹ Such descriptions of Panama and other “tropical” zones reinforced existing tropes labeling “tropical” lands and peoples as uncivilized and resistant to modernization. The disconnect between public belief of nurses and the reality of their work conditions also endured. In 1922 a nurse from Minnesota, known only as O.M.B., explained patients regarded nurse- work, “...too easy; they are not earning their money...” In response the Minnesota nurse groused, “Oh! you wizards with the adding machine, -all you great army of workers, even ye street sweepers and the dish washers, -don’t envy the trained nurse.”⁴² The Minnesota nurse captured some of the sentiments expressed by Zone nurses in their demands for higher pay and better living conditions; value and respect their work. However, it is difficult to reconcile the gaze of outsiders with the experiences of nurses coping with environmental challenges and workplace inequities.