Father Thomas Lawrason Riggs was the first Catholic chaplain at Yale. He was a member of Yale’s class of 1910, where he met Cole Porter, the composer. He later attended graduate school at Harvard, where he roomed with Porter and Dean Acheson, a future secretary of state.

During World War I, Riggs returned to Yale to serve as a translator for the Yale Mobile Hospital Unit. After the war, he became a Catholic priest, and after a visit to the universities at Cambridge and Oxford to consult with their chaplains, he became the chaplain at Yale. He later donated his papers to the university and this notebook is part of the collection:

Items of note include his typed manuscript of Saving Angel and a notebook from 1917 that contains notes from his training for the Yale Mobile Hospital Unit. The notebook is blank in the middle and its back portion contains notes in pencil dated July 18-21. These notes instruct on how to identify contagious diseases, bandage various sprains, set broken bones, and prepare meals for the injured (poached eggs and cocoa are two items on the menu). There is also a particularly sobering section that describes the different sorts of poisonous gas a soldier could inhale, how to identify them, and which ones would prove fatal.

Read more at A Tale of Two Archives: Tracing the Life of Thomas Lawrason Riggs ’10

See other World War I notebooks.