Peking Dust

Ellen Newbold La Motte (1873–1961) was an American nurse, journalist and author. Back in America, 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, LaMotte 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.