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Martha Gellhorn, Unusual Patient
at the Primary Care Station of Mantilla;
She
was a writer, third wife of Ernest
Hemingway and war correspondent.
American writer and war correspondent Martha
Gellhorn, who reported conflicts from the Spanish
Civil War to Vietnam and Panama, and received
first aid at the "Casa de Socorros at
Mantilla in Havana" in the 1930's, died in
her London home on Monday, February 16, 1998. She
had been diagnosed with cancer and was 89 years
of age.
Gellhorn, who wrote 13 novels on her own,
resented being more famous not as a writer but as
the third wife of Ernest Hemingway. "I was a
writer before I met him, and I have been
a writer for 45 years since," she once
complained. "Why should I be a footnote to
someone else's life?"
A graduate of the prestigious Bryn Mawr College,
she launched a reporting career that spanned
several decades and a variety of publications,
including Colliers Weekly, The Guardian of London
and The Atlantic Monthly.
Her novels included The Troubles I 've Seen
(1936), A Stricken Field (1939), The Heart Of
Another(1940), Honeyed Piece (1953), and
Two By Two (1958).
Blond and beautiful, she entranced Hemingway in
the 1930's. They were married for 8 years before
divorcing. During their marriage they visited
Cuba. While traveling in an automobile from the
Rancho Boyeros Airport to downtown Havana
Hemingway got into an accident. Gellhorn became
injured and was taken to a nearby emergency
center, "Casa de Socorros" in
Mantilla. The "Casa de Socorros"
in prerevolutionary Cuba were emergency medical
stations that served everyone without distinction
of economic or social class. They were literraly
free. She was attended there by the medical and
paramedical staff including the young student of
medical sciences and dentistry Ramón de Gordon.
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