Ellen Newbold LaMotte (1873–1961) was an American nurse, journalist and author. She began her nursing career as a tuberculosis nurse in Baltimore, Maryland, then served as an army nurse in Europe during World War I. After the war, LaMotte travelled to Asia, where she witnessed the horrors of opium addiction firsthand.
LaMotte wrote six books based on her travels in Asia, three of them explicitly dealing with the opium problem: Peking Dust (1919), Civilization: Tales of the Orient (1919), Opium Monopoly (1920), Ethics of Opium (1922), Snuffs and Butters (1925) and Opium in Geneva: Or How The Opium Problem is Handled by the League of Nations (1929). Among LaMotte's other publications was The Backwash of War (1916), which was based on her diaries kept during her time at the front.