Ellen Newbold La Motte

The Backwash of War (Dodo Press) Ellen Newbold La Motte

Ellen Newbold La Motte (1873-1961) was an American nurse, journalist, and author. She began her nursing career as a tuberculosis nurse in Baltimore, then served as an army nurse in Europe during World War I. She wrote The Tuberculosis Nurse in 1915. After the war, La Motte travelled to Asia, where she witnessed the horrors of opium addiction firsthand. La Motte wrote six books based on her travels in Asia, three of them explicitly dealing with the opium problem: Peking Dust (1919), Civilization: Tales of the Orient (1919), Opium Monopoly (1920), Ethics of Opium (1922), Snuffs and Butters (1925), and Opium in Geneva: Or How the Opium Problem is Handled by the League of Nations (1929). Among La Motte's other publications was The Backlash of War (1916), which was based on her diaries kept during her time at the front.