Peking Dust. [China - Opium] La Motte, Ellen N. China - General History

Map and 14 black and white photographic illustrations, xi+240 pages, appendices, 19.3 x 13.2 cms; original pictorial tangerine cloth covered boards (a little dusty), couple of small previous owners' signatures on front free endpaper, a very good copy. Extraordinary account of the horrors of opium addiction by Ellen Newbold La Motte (1873 - 1961) an American nurse, journalist and author and one of the first American war nurses to go to Europe and treat soldiers in World War I. After the war, she turned her diary into a book, The Backwash of War (1916), containing fourteen vignettes of typical scenes. The truth she told was unpalatable; the book was suppressed and not republished until 1934. After the war, La Motte travelled to Asia, where she witnessed the horrors of opium addiction. These travels provided her with material for six books, 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). The Chinese Nationalist government awarded her the Lin Tse Hsu Memorial Medal in 1930.