Edith May Winchester came from Fox Chase in northeast Philadelphia and was one of the first American nurses to reach Armenia after the war. She left the United States in February 1919.
She arrived at Erivan (Yerevan) at the height of the typhus epidemic, when the bodies of Armenian refugees were being collected from the streets at a hundred and ninety a day. Typhus is carried by body lice and spreads fastest where people are crowded and cannot wash, which was the condition of every shelter in the city. When Near East Relief called for someone to staff an emergency typhus ward, Winchester was the first to answer. She caught the disease and died on 17 May 1919, three months after leaving home.
A nurses' training school was opened in her memory in the Edith May Winchester Memorial Hospital at Alexandropol (Gyumri), later moved to Erivan. The first nurses registered in the Armenian Republic trained there.
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