Hello I'm James Rogers and this is the history hit World Wars Podcast.

When we think back to pioneers of wartime nursing, we think of the Crimean War,

Anne Mary Seacarl or Florence Nightingale, or perhaps the First World War and Edith Cavell. But in this

podcast I got to find out about the forgotten fascinating history of Val Boer Yort,

who was actually a student of Edevel but would go on to become a world expert in how to set up wartime field hospitals.

She was in Belgium close to the front lines. She was in St. Petersburg and travelled round to set up the first field hospitals in Estonia.

And it's through her memoirs that we get actually quite a gruesome glimpse of what it was like within the operating

theaters and the anonymity between injured soldiers. I'm here with Jacob Syrup who is an author, researcher and curator of modern history at the Museum of Bornhamen.

Jacob has taken me around to Citibels on Bornholm, directed me towards Soviet war memorials and been really exploring the history of Bornholm here, especially during the Soviet occupation, which we're running a project for for history

hits and if you want to learn more you can listen to a previous podcast by Professor

Caroline Kennedy Pipe on Stalin's Danish mystery. But we're here to talk about a slightly different more purpose. in the

dainish mystery, but we're here to talk about a slightly different more personal individual history of someone from Borne-Homb, a Valbouryort.

Now, who was Valbour and why is she important to our understanding of the history of war?

Well she was a young woman born in the 1870s and she went to

went to see the world. So in 1912, she went to Brussels to work in a medical clinic there.

And from there, history sort of took her to the battlefields of Europe and

through her story you sort of see the big history in the little history in the personal history of

well-boe she is our eyes and ears.

So we're sitting here in Borneholm Museum on Borneholm in the middle of the Baltic and it doesn't escape our attention that this is a small island.

What makes Valboa want to go out there and to become a nurse and to be involved in these global battles? I think a back... a outlook. Her father was a potter originally and had established a terracotta factory here on

Borneholm and you could find his products all over the world. He sold to Russia and to France and to Italy

in the United States and he maintained a vast network

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