Community Corner
Belleville Hospital's Namesake, Clara Maass, In NJ Hall Of Fame
Clara Maass, namesake of a Belleville hospital, died in the name of science. She was posthumously inducted to the NJHOF.
ESSEX COUNTY, NJ — Essex County nurse Clara Maass, a late Newark and East Orange resident whose name now graces a hospital in Belleville, is officially a member of the New Jersey Hall of Fame.
Who was Maass? According to the New Jersey Department of Military and Veterans Affairs:
"Clara Louise Maass was born in Newark, NJ, in 1876. The daughter of German immigrants, she was one of the first graduates of the Newark German Hospital School of Nursing and became a contract nurse to the U.S. Army during the Spanish-American War of 1898. Maass served in hospitals at Jacksonville, Florida, Savannah, Georgia, Havana, Cuba and Manila during the subsequent Philippine Insurrection. In 1901, Maass, serving once more in Havana, volunteered to be bitten by a mosquito as part of Major William Gorgas' campaign against Yellow Fever. She contracted the disease and subsequently died. Maass' sacrifice helped convince physicians that Yellow Fever was spread by mosquito bites, leading to a program that helped eradicate the disease. Maass was buried in Newark with a full military funeral, and the German Hospital renamed as Clara Maass Memorial Hospital in her honor."
Maass, who also lived in East Orange, was posthumously inducted into the New Jersey Hall of Fame during a ceremony on May 6 in Asbury Park.
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“Induction into the New Jersey Hall of Fame is the highest civilian honor that our state can bestow on someone,” Governor Phil Murphy stated. “It’s a celebration of New Jersey that inspires the next generation of New Jersey leaders. Our inductees remind us how so many of our citizens have transformed the world, and how proud we should be of that fact as New Jerseyans.”
“I am very proud to honor Clara Louise Maass, a native daughter of East Orange, who lived just steps away from East Orange City Hall, but who sacrificed her life so that others could be saved from the yellow fever epidemic that was infecting U.S. soldiers and spreading throughout Cuba at that time,” East Orange Mayor Ted Green said last week during a ceremony to honor National Nurses Week.
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