One Hundred Years of Wartime Nursing Practices, 1854-1953

This book demonstrates the continuities and the changes in wartime nursing during the one hundred years, from 1854 to 1953. It examines the work that nurses of many differing nations undertook during the Crimean War, the Boer War, the Spanish Civil War, both World Wars and the Korean War. The influence that Florence Nightingale had on Southern women providing nursing care to Confederate soldiers during the American Civil War, and the work of the flight nurses, are detailed. The book also examines the challenges faced by nurses caring for the thousands of soldiers suffering from typhoid epidemics, and those at the Norwegian Mobile Army Surgical Hospital (NORMASH). The decades following the Crimean War witnessed a burgeoning of personal narratives relating accounts of nurses who ministered to combatants in the Franco-Prussian and Anglo-Zulu wars. In considering the work of First World War military nurses, the book explores the dangerous military and political worlds in which nurses negotiated their practice. The book argues that the air evacuation system which had originated during the Second World War was an exciting nursing innovation for the service of the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF). At the beginning of the Second Anglo-Boer War, there were three distinct groups of female nurses: the Army Nursing Reserve; civilian nurses; and volunteers, many of whom came under the auspices of the Red Cross. The humanitarian work of trained and volunteer nurses after the liberation of Bergen-Belsen in 1945, and their clinical wisdom enabled many of the victims to rehabilitate.