The Dahlgren Papers uniquely concern Anna Dahlgren's career and experiences with the missionary and nursing program at the Iloilo Mission Hospital, Panay, the Philippines in 1920-1921. Surviving correspondence traces her application to the missionary program, the logistics of service, and also includes letters from colleagues and acquaintances she made during her time in the Pacific. Very little information concerns medical cases or functions of the hospital and training school, and a diary Dahlgren kept is mostly limited to outlines of her travels. Publications dating some years after her service provide a historical context for the mission hospital program. All of this documentary material frames the most significant component of the papers, which is a collection of contemporary photographs taken by Dahlgren. Subjects include the hospital compound itself, nurses and medical staff, nursing students and classes, views of cities, landscapes, and events, and a variety of Philippine peoples in native dress. A period postcard collection also offers scenes of Philippine culture.
Anna Linnea Dahlgren (1893-1988), a native of Evanston, Illinois, was the child of Scandinavian immigrants to America. She grew up with an extended family of siblings, half-siblings, and cousins, and began a nursing career in Chicago, ultimately graduating from the Chicago School for Nurses of the Englewood Hospital in 1916. After several years employment at Englewood, Dahlgren applied to the Women's American Baptist Foreign Missionary Society for nursing work overseas. She was accepted to the Society and spent the fall of 1919 at Hasseltine House, Newton Center, near Boston, in preparation for mission service with other young women enrolled in the Society. In February, 1920, she was booked for passage on a steamer bound from the west coast for Japan, then on other ships calling at ports in China and finally at Manila, the Philippines, where she arrived in April. Dahlgren saw service at the Iloilo Mission Hospital and Nurses' Training School on the island of Panay until the summer of 1921, when she returned to the States. Dahlgren continued professional nursing in Chicago and in Humbolt, Arizona, where she had gone to assist her brother, undergoing treatment for tuberculosis in the warm, dry climate of the southwest. There she met and married her husband, Horace L. Hopkins, and moved with him to San Francisco in 1927, where they spent the remainder of their lives, and she continued her career as a nurse in a doctor's private practice.
The Dahlgren materials have been separated into two groups, the first comprising documents (contained in Box 1) and the second comprising photographs (contained in Box 2). The documents are arranged in alphabetical subject categories, then chronologically by item. The photographs, largely taken by Dahlgren, herself, follow her own categorization, an arrangement generally by place.