Volunteer
nurses from the North and South served as
volunteer nurses in military hospitals during
the American Civil War. With over 5,000
serving as nurses, they experienced amputated
limbs, mutilated bodies, disease and death.
Louisa May Alcott, Jane Stuart Woolsey and
Katharine Prescott Wormeley recorded their
experiences. Dorothea Dix and Clara Barton were
the leaders of a national effort to organize a
nursing corps to care for the war's wounded and
sick. Dix was already recognized for her work in
improving the treatment received by the insane
when she began to recruit women to serve as
nurses in the Army Medical Bureau. Military
traditionalists opposed her, but she prevailed,
armed with plain looks and recruits who called
her "Dragon Dix."
Clara Barton
established the American Red Cross by 1881 at
age 60. She persuaded the government to
recognize the Red Cross to provide aid for
natural disasters. Barton continued to do relief
work in the field until she was well into her
70s. But she was not a strong administrator, and
political feuding at the American Red Cross
forced her to resign as president in 1904.
