Marie Depage

Marie Pauline Depage (23 September 1872 – 7 May 1915) was a Belgian nurse, and wife of Dr Antoine Depage. She was killed in the sinking of the RMS Lusitania, and she is commemorated in Belgium alongside the British nurse Edith Cavell

She was born Marie Pauline Picard, in Ixelles near Brussels in Belgium, one of two daughters and two sons of the engineer Désiré Émile Picard and Julie Marie Victorine Héger. She was a niece of Professor Paul Héger and granddaughter of Constantin Héger.

She married a Belgian doctor Antoine Depage on 8 August 1893. They had three sons.

Her husband was a surgeon to the Belgian King Albert, and chairman of the Belgian Red Cross. He was also a founder of the International Society of Surgery (Societe internationale de chirurgie) in 1902. Depage showed talent in drawing and painting; after studying human anatomy, she drew illustrations of her husband's surgical work.

Concerned at the antiquated nursing practice in Belgian hospitals run by nuns, Antoine Depage founded a laicised non-denominational medical institute in 1907, the Berkendael Medical Institute (also known as L'École Belge d’Infirmières Diplômées), in Uccle near Brussels, with Edith Cavell as head nurse. Marie Depage took on the administrative work. The couple were also involved in the introduction of Baden-Powell's scouting movement into Belgium in 1909-10, and Marie translated and published several of Baden-Powell's books.

With her husband and eldest son Pierre, also a surgeon, Depage organised sending four Belgian ambulances to the Balkans during the First Balkan War in 1912-13, accompanying the ambulance sent to a hospital in Constantinople.

After the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, Depage volunteered at the Red Cross hospital established at the Royal Palace in Brussels, and then helped her husband to covert the Grand Hôtel de l'Océan at De Panne (also known in French as La Panne) into a Red Cross hospital for military casualties (see ), and organised surgical units to treat wounded soldiers of the Belgian Army near the Yser Front.

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