Alice Carr

Alice Griffith Carr was born in Yellow Springs, Ohio, in 1887. She graduated from Antioch College and trained as a nurse at the Johns Hopkins training school in Baltimore, finishing in 1914. In 1917, she went to France with the first contingent of American Red Cross nurses and served at a base hospital near Verdun for two years, followed by Red Cross postings in Poland, Lithuania, Serbia, Smyrna (Izmir), Czechoslovakia, and Syria.

While stationed in Greece in 1923, she joined Near East Relief, which was then caring for tens of thousands of Armenian and Greek orphans and refugees displaced by the Armenian and Greek Genocides and the Smyrna catastrophe. At the Corinth orphanage, she organized an anti-malaria campaign of drainage, household sanitation visits, and daily quinine distribution that cleared malaria from the area within a year. In 1925, the provincial government asked her to help draft anti-malaria laws. She helped contain the 1927–28 Athens dengue epidemic.

After Near East Relief became the Near East Foundation in 1930, she served as Director of Public Health in Greece and built rural health clinics, including one at Marathon in 1933. Forced out when German forces occupied Greece in 1941, she became the Foundation’s public health advisor in New York and retired in 1948. She died in 1968.