USPS Centenary of Clara Maass's Birth

USPS on 18 August 1976 issued a 13-cent stamp honouring the centenary of Clara Maass's birth. The stamp, designed by Paul Calle, featured a portrait of Clara Maass wearing a Newark German Hospital pin.

She was the first nurse honoured with a U.S. postage stamp and additionally was also the first nurse to have a hospital named after them. Also in 1976, the American Nurses Association inducted her into its Nursing Hall of Fame. The Calendar of Saints of the Lutheran Church honors Maass and British nurse Florence Nightingale on August 13 as a "Renewer of Society."

The multicoloured stamp  was printed on the Bureau of Engraving and Printing seven-color Andreotti gravure press (601) as sheets of 160 subjects, tagged, perforated 11, and distributed as panes of forty (eight across, five down).

Clara Maass (1876 - 1901), a daughter of German immigrants, worked as an army nurse in Florida, Cuba, and the Philippines during the Spanish-American War. She returned to Cuba in 1900 at the request of Maj. William Gorgas, chief sanitation officer, where she became involved in a study of the cause of yellow fever. To determine whether the tropical fever was caused by city filth or the bite of a mosquito, seven volunteers, including Maass, were bitten by the mosquitoes. Two men died, but she survived. She volunteered again several months later, this time being infected. Maass died of yellow fever at the age of twenty-five. In her memory, Newark German Hospital (New Jersey) was renamed Clara Maass Memorial Hospital.

Reference: Scott 2005 Specialised Catalogue of U.S. Stamps and Covers

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