At the height of the great pandemic, in cities like Boston and San Francisco the cry went out for more nurses. In Philadelphia, the director of public health announced that what the city needed was “nurses, nurses and more nurses.”
Despite sounding familiar, this wasn’t a recent event. The call for nurses was issued in 1919 in response to America’s most deadly pandemic, the Spanish flu. Nurses have always been the frontline troopers in the war against death and disease.
In 1854, England was embroiled in a futile war in the Crimea. Death rates for the wounded were outrageous. Hospital conditions were atrocious. Into this maelstrom of disease stepped the most unlikely of persons. A frail young woman from England named Florence Nightingale, who led 38 other volunteers to the rescue.
Nightingale, considered the first modern nurse, instituted sanitary reforms that reduced death rates in the hospitals from diseases like typhoid, cholera and dysentery. Her solution included simple measures like washing hands and more complex efforts like prefabricated hospitals and cleaning out the sewers. She was known to make rounds late into the night, long after the doctors had retired for the evening. Some soldiers called her “The Lady with the Lamp.”
Less than a decade later, war broke out in America. The Civil War is still one of the bloodiest we have ever fought as a country. Early on, an American woman, a former teacher, arrived at the front lines to nurse the soldiers. Sometimes called the “Florence Nightingale of America,” Clara Barton and an organization she founded called the Ladies Aid Society ministered to the wounded on both sides and gathered supplies.
Barton was often near the front. So close, that one day a stray bullet tore through her dress and killed a patient she was tending. Following the battle of Cedar Mountain, Barton arrived at a desperately overwhelmed field hospital after midnight with a mountain of supplies. After that, some called her the “Angel of the Battlefield.” After the war, Barton headed up a number of relief efforts, including a team that responded to the Yellow Fever epidemic in Florida that ravaged Jacksonville in the 1880s. She also founded the American Red Cross.
Following the attack on Pearl Harbor, the U.S. military realized they were suffering from a severe lack of nurses. There were under 1,000 in the Army and just over 800 in the Navy. Within six months that number would increase to over 12,000. In all, we would provide free training to 125,000 nurses from 1943 to 1948. Many of those, like Regina Benson, continued their nursing career after the war ended. Later, she would say that the most rewarding moment of her time as an Army nurse was telling a mother that her son did not die alone.
Nurses’ Week runs from May 6 to May 12. The latter date is Florence Nightingale’s birthday. She would be 202 years old this year.
Scott A. Grant is a local historian and author.
