![]() Our highly skilled nurses at Roswell Park continue that legacy. ![]() She later co-founded the National Association of Colored Graduate Nurses. Out of a class of 40, she was one of only four women who graduated, becoming the nation’s first formally trained black nurse. In 1878, 33-year-old Mary Eliza Mahoney, the daughter of freed slaves, enrolled in the same program. Linda Richards, the first graduate of the intensive 16-month program, went on to establish the system we use today of maintaining individual medical charts and records for patients. was established at the New England Hospital for Women and Children in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1872. The first formal nurse training program in the U.S. In 1869, four years after the war ended, the American Medical Association convened a committee to investigate whether there was a need for nurse training programs, concluding later, “It is just as necessary to have well-trained, well-instructed nurses as it is to have intelligent and skillful physicians.”Ībove left: Linda Richards. Sanitary Commission were approximately half those of other facilities.) In the wards where there was the best nursing, there were always the fewest deaths.” (In fact, disease rates in wards overseen by the U.S. But by the end of the war, they had earned the respect of their patients and the medical community, who had come to rely on them.Īfter the war, a Wisconsin soldier who had been treated at the Adams Hospital in Memphis wrote, “A careful observation of over two years has taught me that nursing is fully as important as medicine. In most hospitals they changed dressings, washed patients, prepared meals and fed the men, emptied bedpans and chamber pots, administered medications and wrote letters to the men’s families at home.ĭriven by compassion, nurses of the Civil War worked long hours in extremely difficult conditions, put their own lives at risk and often suffered the outright contempt of surgeons and military officials. In some hospitals they assisted surgeons. Nurses’ duties varied depending on whether they served in hospitals, field hospitals close to the battlefields or on the battlefields after the fighting stopped. If they could read and were very lucky, they might have a copy of the 1837 handbook The Family Nurse to refer to when caring for the sick and elderly at home. For the most part, women learned nursing from their mothers. No previous training was required to be a nurse, because no training programs existed. Nuns from various religious orders also served as nurses, and there were women and men who served as nurse volunteers - just not in an official capacity. Louisa May Alcott served as a nurse at this hotel-turned-hospital in Washington, DC. ![]() ![]()
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