Researcher: Karina Huang, Stuyvesant '26

Dorothy Wing Fontaine was born in River Valley, Massachusetts on July 12, 1904. She graduated with a BS from Boston University in 1932. Afterwards, she lived in New York City on 182 West 4th Street and worked in Dr. Alexis Carrel’s lab at the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research in New York City as a specialist in tissue culture. She was a part of the Communist Party of the United States. Fontaine decided to go due to the lack of women with technical laboratory training, and she thought that she would be useful in Spain.

Arriving with the 3rd group of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, she served in Spain from May 1, 1937 to July 26, 1938 as a laboratory technician, and she served in the Cordoba Front and Vic. She was a part of the 86th Mixed Brigade.

In Spain, she took blood counts, did blood typing, performed blood transfusions, and did tuberculosis tests. While working in The American Hospital of Belalcazar on the Cordoba Front, she pointed out the lack of resources in the hospital: a lack of running water, no cooling system for storing blood and transfusions, and an overall lack of supplies such as gauze, morphine, boric acid, etc. In an interview on Radio Madrid, she describes how she would frequently only receive half of the supplies she needed, and how they could only order a couple kilos of supplies at a time, while in the United States, they would have ordered hundreds of pounds. As a result, Fontaine ended up working as not only a laboratory technician, but also a pharmacist and sanitary engineer.

A lot of the work she did was to combat malaria. In order to separate malaria patients from everyone else, she examined the red blood cells of every patient that arrived. This eventually led to her contracting malaria, which fortunately she recovered quickly from.
She worked at the Tarancón Hospital near Jarama Valley in 1937. Later, she joined the staff at Vic Hospital; then the American Hospital of Villa Paz.

While in Spain, Fontaine noted the political fervor of herself and the other nurses and doctors around her. In a letter to Fredericka Martin, the chief nurse and administrator of the American medical volunteers in the Spanish Civil War, she wrote about how she believed that the nurses had more political fervor compared to their male counterparts. This was due to the fact that most nurses, like Fontaine, had joined the war already knowing the trade, while many men joined to become doctors because they had no other career options.

In the US, she joined the Medical Bureau as a speaker and fund-raiser. She wanted to persuade people against the US’s neutrality pact, lobbying to get the Arms Embargo lifted, and inform people about the Spanish Civil War as a whole. Additionally, in the US, she helped send food, medical supplies, and clothing to be distributed in Spain to aid in the war effort. She believed that this was important not only in that it gave the Spanish people supplies, but also as a way of letting them know that there was support and sympathy from people in the US. When she returned to the United States, she married Emile Mardfin in New Canaan, Connecticut on August 17, 1945, and changed her last name to Mardfin, making her Dorothy Wing Mardfin.

Upon her return, she also worked as a research assistant in oral pathology/dentistry at the University of Illinois until July 27, 1958. Afterwards, she worked for the University of Puerto Rico at Ponce, researching dental health improvements. She edited many books on preventive medicine and continued to push for the democratization of health services.
She died in Hanover, Massachusetts on April 11, 1987 at the age of 82.

Sources

Casillas Sánchez, Feliciano. n.d. “LA SANIDAD Y LAS BRIGADAS INTERNACIONALES EN LA ZONA NORTE de CÓRDOBA.” Asociacion De Amigos De Las Brigadas Internacionales . Accessed April 30, 2026. https://brigadasinternacionales.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/La-sanidad-en-Cordoba.pdf.

“FONTAINE, Dorothy Wing | Sidbrint.” 1936. Puntzero.cat. 1936. https://sidbrint.puntzero.cat/brigadista/fontaine-dorothy-wing#mapa.
“Fontaine, Dorthy Wing | the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives.” 2019. The Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives. December 10, 2019. https://alba-valb.org/volunteers/dorthy-wing-fontaine/.

“Fontaine Family History.” 2016. Sortedbyname.com. 2016. https://sortedbyname.com/letter_f/fontaine/index_40.html.

“Mardfin Family History.” 2026. Sortedbyname.com. 2026. https://sortedbyname.com/letter_m/mardfin.html.

“MEETING of the BOARD of TRUSTEES of the UNIVERSITY of ILLINOIS.” 1958. The University of Illinois. https://www.trustees.uillinois.edu/trustees/minutes/1958/1958-07-29-uibot.pdf.
Sadurní-Bassols, Cinta, Gloria Gallego-Caminero, and Paola Galbany-Estragués. 2023. “Fanny Bré in the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939): The Meaning of Nursing Care in the International Brigades.” Nursing Inquiry 30 (4). https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/nin.12559.

“The Lincoln Brigade Sisterhood: U.S. Women 2019s Involvement in the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939.” 2019. Scribd. 2019. https://www.scribd.com/document/8279737/The-Lincoln-Brigade-Sisterhood-U-S-Women2019s-Involvement-in-the-Spanish-Civil-War-1936-1939#content=query:fontaine.