The Backwash of War

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: