Theme: Louisa May Alcott- her life and work

When the hostilities broke out, the Alcotts, like many other New England families, considered the sectional fight as a exceptional marketing campaign to cease slavery. Unlike the fictional Mr. March of Little Women, Louisa’s father Bronson Alcott, a philosopher, instructional reformer and Trans¬cendentalist who had prolonged battled financial woes, was once over 60 and too old to serve. But his 2nd daughter—who used to be through then drawing close to 30 and already accustomed to questioning of herself as a spinster, destined to come to be the breadwinner of their family—burned with desire to help the Union cause. Given what we comprehend about Louisa’s tomboy leanings, it appears completely herbal that she refused to be blissful with knitting socks and stitching bandages, selecting on the other hand to volunteer for the Union’s fledgling corps of woman nurses.

At the war’s outbreak there had been no girl nurses, and the scientific departments of each the Union and Confederate armies have been woefully unprepared for the torrent of casualties from wounds and ailment that quickly overwhelmed them. The only nursing care was once provided via convalescent soldiers. Women commenced travelling to the battlefields and hospitals to strive to beneficial aid their cherished ones.Many of the conflict’s most accepted nurses commenced this way, which include “Mother” Mary Ann Bicker¬¬dyke, who was once once so revered through Union troops that she used to be invited with the useful resource of William T. Sherman to trip in the Grand Review in Washington at the war’s end. Inspired through the example of England’s Florence Nightingale in the course of the Crimean War, girls additionally pressed to serve formally. Despite resistance from the navy scientific establishment, through August 1861 female may want to be officially mustered as nurses, “to get hold of forty cents a day and one ration.”

Still, it was once no longer until the summer season of 1862 that girls commenced to serve in numbers, and Surgeon General William Hammond issued Circular No. 7, putting forth the conditions under which female would be accepted. That order became the template for Dorothea Dix, the first super¬visor of Nurses. Only “matronly” female between 35 (quickly decreased to 30) and 50 who may additionally desire to furnish personality references would be accepted, and they want to agree to costume it appears that in “brown, gray, or black…without adorns of any sort.” No formal teaching was required due to the fact that none was as soon as available, completely “a capacity to care for the sick.”