Voluntary Aid Detachment
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The Voluntary Aid Detachment was a voluntary organisation providing auxiliary nursing services, mainly in hospitals, in the United Kingdom and various other countries in the British Empire. The organisation was founded in 1909 with the help of the Red Cross and Order of St. John.
The organisation's most important period of operation was during World War I and World War II. With the outbreak of the First World War, nurses were in short supply, and the VAD supplemented the work of registered nurses.
Famous VAD nurses included novelist Agatha Christie, writer Vera Brittain, and War Poet May Wedderburn Cannan.
In Ernest Hemingway's novel A Farewell to Arms, Catherine Barkley is a VAD.
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