: Health Hinge

Her cremation ceremony, on March 10, 1996, was one of the biggest events Thailand has witnessed in modern times, attended by thousands of people and watched on television nationwide. Her ashes were afterwards enshrined in the Wat Ratchabophit temple in Bangkok. Srinagarindra was beloved and highly respected in Thailand as a person of integrity and good morals. In 1993, in remembrance of her, the king established The Princess Mother Memorial Park in Bangkok, which consists of gardens and a reproduction of her childhood home.

The Princess Mother was actively involved with numerous charitable activities, including assisting the Border Patrol Police, visiting disabled soldiers, the needy and congested community dwellers, and initiating volunteer doctor units to help the hilltribe people in the north. She formed the Volunteer Doctors Foundation to support the activities of the Volunteer Doctor Units. She gave donations to help build schools in remote areas, and invited others to help in the project. She also set up the Princess Mother’s Fund to help support various other charities.

In her later years, Srinagarindra was strongly involved with projects to aid the hilltribe people in northern Thailand, especially around Doi Tung, Mae Fa Luang district, Chiang Rai Province.

Doi Tung royal villa

In the middle of 1991, she apparently fell in her bedroom, after which her health never returned to normal. In November 1993, December 1994 and again in June 1995 she was admitted to the Siriraj Hospital for treatment. She died in Bangkok on 18 July 1995, at the age of 94.

In 1920, Prince Mahidol and his wife returned to Bangkok and were married with royal consent. She thus acquired the title Mom, given to a commoner married to a high ranking royal. She and her husband had three children:
HRH Princess Galyani Vadhana (born in 1923, in London, England - who died on January 2, 2008, in Bangkok, Thailand);
HM King Ananda Mahidol (born 1925 in Heidelberg, Germany, who later became King Rama VIII - died on 9 June 1946 in Bangkok);
HM King Bhumibol Adulyadej (born 1927 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who later became King Rama IX, and still reigns today in Thailand).

The couple again returned to Thailand in 1928. However, after only about a year in Thailand, Prince Mahidol died. He was survived by his consort, who was then 29 years old, and their three young children.

In 1935, King Prajadhipok (Rama VII) abdicated. Prince Ananda Mahidol, then only ten years old, was chosen to succeed to the throne. After the still unsolved death of King Ananda Mahidol, his brother Bhumibol Adulyadej would become the monarch.

Srinagarindra was born in Thonburi to an ethnic Chinese goldsmith and his Thai wife.[1] By the time she was nine years old, both her parents had died, leaving her an orphan. However, before that she had been entered into the service of Princess Valaya Alongkorn, who was a daughter of King Chulalongkorn (Rama V).

Sangwan was first educated at Anongkaram School and later at Satri Withaya, a well known girl’s school in Bangkok. She graduated in 1916 from the school of nursing at Siriraj Hospital. Through a royal scholarship, she was sent to study in the USA.

She first went to the Emerson School in Berkeley, California, where she learned English, before continuing her studies at the Northwest School in Hartford, Connecticut. There she met and fell in love with Mahidol Adulyadej, Prince of Songkhla, a son of King Chulalongkorn.

She also attended an all-girl school, Simmons College (Boston, Massachusetts), during the early 1900s. To this day, the royal family remains in touch with the college and regularly visits the school when they are in Massachusetts.

Srinagarindra (Thai: ???????????) (21 October 1900 – 18 July 1995) (pronounced See-nakarin) was the Princess Mother of Thailand, the mother to two kings of Thailand, Bhumibol Adulyadej and Ananda Mahidol.

Her given name was Sangwan (Thai: ????????), while her formal name and title were Somdej Phra Srinagarindra Boromarajajonani (Thai: ??????????????????????????????). In Thailand, the she was affectionately called Somdej Ya (Thai: ?????????), “the Royal Grandmother”. By the various hill tribe people, to whom she was a special patron, she was called Mae Fah Luang (Thai: ??????????), “Royal Mother from the Sky”, or “The Heavenly Royal Mother”.

Emmy Carolina Rappe, (14 January 1835-1896), was a Swedish nurse and principal for a nurcing school. She was one of the pioneers and founders of the Swedish nursing education.

Rappe was born to nobleman Baron Adolf Fredrik Rappe and Ulrika Catharina Wilhelmina Hammarskjöld. Rappe was considered to be a suitable candidate to establish a proper school for the education of profesional nurses in Sweden, and was in 1866 sent as a student to Florence Nightingales school at St Thomas’ Hospital in London.

She returned to Sweden in 1867, and studied at Sahlgrenska sjukhuset hospital in Göteborg and at others clinics in Stockholm, before she was made head nurse and principal of the newly established nursing school in Uppsala. In 1877, she mowed to Uppsala centralhospital. After her retirement, she was active as a hospital inspector.

C.Mabel Richmers: Among prisoners of war in Russia and Siberia 1926, Mutchinson and Co. Ltd.
Magdalena Padberg: Das Leben der Elsa Brändström. Ein Hilfswerk in drei Erdteilen. Herder. Freiburg, 1989. ISBN 3451086417.
Gerhard Zimmermann: Liebe hat Augen, Hände und Füße. ISBN 3761550170
Dietmar Kruczek: Eine Frau zwischen den Fronten. Das Leben der Elsa Brändström. Aussaat. 2000. ISBN 3761551584.
Heinz Vonhoff: Elsa Brändström. Ein Leben für Gefangene, Verfolgte und Hilflose. Claudius. München, 1982. ISBN 3583310039.
Norgard Kohlhagen: Elsa Brändström. Die Frau, die man Engel nannte. Eine Biographie. 1992. ISBN 3791819836.

1921 Bland Krigsfångar i Ryssland och Sibirien 1914-1920 (Among POWs in Russia and Siberia)
World War II - Initiator of aid institutions CARE International und CRALOG

Elsa Brändström was born in 1888 in St. Petersburg, the daughter of the Military Attache at the Swedish Embassy, Edvard Brändström, and his wife Anna Eschelsson. In 1891, when Elsa was three years old, Edvard Brändström and his family returned to Sweden. In 1906, Brändström, now a General, became the Swedish Ambassador at the court of Tsar Nicholas II and returned to St Petersburg.

Elsa spent her childhood in Linköping in Sweden. From 1906 to 1908, she studied at the Anna Sandström Teachers Training College in Stockholm but returned to St. Petersburg in 1908. Her mother died in 1913. Elsa was in St. Petersburg at the outbreak of World War I and volunteered for a position as a nurse in the Russian army.

In 1915, she went to Siberia for the Swedish Red Cross, to introduce basic medical treatment for the German POWs. Back in St. Petersburg, she began the establishment of a Swedish Aid organization. Her work was severely hindered by the outburst of the October Revolution in the year 1917. In 1918, the Russian authorities withdrew her work permit but, nevertheless, she did not give up. Between 1919 and 1920, she made several trips to Siberia until she was arrested in Omsk in 1920. After her release, she moved back to Sweden and organized fund-raising for POWs.

In 1922 her book, “Unter Kriegsgefangen in Rußland und Sibirien 1914-1920“ (Among POWs in Russia and Siberia 1914-1920) was published. From then onwards she looked after former POWs in a rehabilitation sanatorium for home coming German soldiers in Marienborn-Schmeckwitz. She bought a mill named “Schreibermühle“ close to Lychen (Uckermark) and used it as resocialization centre for former POWs. Schreibermühle had extensive lands including fields, forest and meadows on which potatoes and other crops could be grown. This was most useful at that time because the German Mark was an unstable currency and lost value from day to day. In 1923, she undertook a six month tour in the USA, giving lectures to raise money for a new home for children deceased and traumatized POW’s. On her trip she raised US$100,00 and travelled to 65 towns. This amount was unexpectedly high, since the American citizens by that time were not very friendly towards Germans. In January 1924, she founded a children’s home “Neusorge” (Mittweida) which had room for more than 200 orphans and children in need.

In 1925, a fund raising trip to Sweden followed. In 1929, she travelled to Russia again and in the same year she married Robert Ulich, a Professor of Pedagogy. Afterwards, she moved together with him to Dresden. In 1931, she sold the “Schreibermühle“ and donated her other home, Neusorge, to the Welfare Centre in Leipzig. She founded the “Elsa-Brändström-Foundation-for Women” (the foundation awarded scholarships to children from Neusorge). On 3 January 1932, her daughter Brita was born in Dresden.

In 1933, Robert Ulich accepted a lectureship at Harvard University and in consequence the family moved to the USA. Here Elsa gave aid to newly arrived German and Austrian refugees. In 1939, she opened the “Window-Shop”, a restaurant which gave work opportunities for refugees in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

After World War II ended, she started to raise funds for children in need in Germany, and as a result, the organizations CARE International (Cooperative for American Relief in Europe) and CRALOG (Council of Relief Agencies Licensed for Operation in Germany) were established. She undertook a final lecture tour in Europe on behalf of the “Save the Children Fund”. She could not undertake her last planned journey to Germany because of illness. She died in 1948 of bone cancer.

Because of her commitment to POWs, she became famous as a “patron saint” for soldiers. In Germany, many streets, schools and institutions are named after her.

Elsa Brändström (*March 26, 1888 – †March 4, 1948) was a Swedish philanthropist.