International Nurses Day is celebrated every May 12, the anniversary of Florence Nightingale’s birth.
“Cmdr. Thomas A. Gaylord, USN (Ret’d), administers oath to five new Navy nurses commissioned in New York…” Phyllis Mae Dailey, the Navy’s first African-American nurse, is second from the right. March 8, 1945.
Louisa May Alcott (November 29, 1832 - March 6, 1888) - Civil War Nurse
via Prologue: Pieces of History » Little Women in the Civil War
About 20,000 women volunteered in military hospitals during the Civil War. Unfortunately, the majority of them left little or no written evidence of their sacrifice in the war. Louisa May Alcott, renowned 19th-century author of Little Women, was one of them, and her service is documented in a Washington, D.C., hospital’s muster roll.
As her muster roll indicates, she was stationed at the “Union Hotel U.S.A. General Hospital,” a makeshift military hospital in “Georgetown, D.C.” She served under the superintendent of Union Army nurses, Dorothea Dix, as a “female nurse” for November and December 1862 and received ten dollars pay.
Her time as a nurse later served as the foundation for her novel Hospital Sketches (1863). The novel, a fictionalized account composed from letters written home during the war, was her first bestseller.
What’s your favorite Louisa May Alcott book?
“Nurse wearing a mask as protection against influenza. September 13, 1918.”
The influenza epidemic of 1918 first emerged without warning in late spring of 1918, and was known as the “three-day fever.” Few deaths were reported and victims recovered after a few days. When the disease surfaced again that fall, it was far more severe. One fifth of the world’s population was attacked by this deadly virus. Within months, it had killed more people than any other illness in recorded history.
August 15, 1944 - African American U.S. Army Nurses arrive in Greenock, Scotland
