A Chain of Errors about Continental Army Nurses

Just as Google Books helped me find the actual sources for the quotations in the U.S. Army webpage about women in the service, it also offered some explanation for how those quotations got misattributed.

The first stop is an article in the journal The Military Surgeon: “The Forerunners of the American Army Nurse” by Maj. Julia C. Stimson, Capt. Sayres L. Milliken, and Ethel C. S. Thompson, published in 1926.

In a passage about “the army organized for the invasion of Canada” (shown above), the authors wrote:

Later Gen. [Horatio] Gates protested about the unsatisfactory health conditions in the Army on the northern frontier. The congressional committee, sent to investigate, evidently found to its surprise that the situation was even as black as Gen. Gates had painted. Although there was by that time a large supply of medicine, “the sick suffered much for want of good female nurses and comfortable bedding, many of those poor creatures being obliged to lay upon bare boards.”

As I showed yesterday, that concluding quotation came from a Continental Congress committee consisting of Richard Stockton and George Clymer. A quick reading, however, would lead one to believe those words actually came from Gates. The page’s citations to Peter Force’s American Archives are accurate but opaque.

(In fact, the names of Stockton and Clymer don’t appear in the American Archives entry, so Stimson, Milliken, and Thompson were probably hard-pressed to credit them by name. I had to look them up in another source—and could, thanks to Google Books.)

The next step was a U.S. Army publication issued in 1975 at the start of the Bicentennial, Highlights in the History of the Army Nurse. There’s no official author, but the foreword was signed by Lt. Col. Dorothy E. Zalaback, Army Nurse Corps Historian. Its text has been republished several times since, including on the web.

The first entry in that booklet’s timeline says:

14 Jun 1775 The Second Continental Congress authorized the Continental Army which later became the United States Army. Shortly thereafter, Maj. Gen. Horatio Gates on the northern frontier reported to Commander in Chief George Washington that “the sick suffered much for Want of good female Nurses.” General Washington then asked the Congress for “a matron to supervise the nurses, bedding, etc.,” and for nurses “to attend the sick and obey the matron's orders.”

It looks like the History of the Army Nurse authorial team used the Military Surgeon article to attribute the statement about “female nurses” to Gates, and also mussed up the timeline between June 1775 and November 1776.

That raises the question of why the History of the Army Nurse team fixed on a quotation from an obscure Congress committee in late 1776 rather than the Congress’s official 27 July 1775 resolution setting up the military hospital with a “matron” and “nurses,” which has always been much easier to find.

I suspect the big factor was that the committee report was explicit in calling for “female nurses” (my emphasis). The 1775 resolution didn’t specify the nurses’ gender. The men at the Congress probably assumed that nurses should be female—it didn’t seem necessary to be explicit.

I want to note that in 1981 the army also published The Army Medical Department, 1775–1818, by Mary C. Gillett (P.D.F. download). That’s another Bicentennial-era history, but it quoted the Congress’s resolutions, the Stockton-Clymer committee report, and other documents accurately.

If I had the chance to rewrite the U.S. military webpage I started with, I’d say:

In July 1775, a month after establishing the Continental Army, the Continental Congress laid out its first guidelines for a military hospital. The staff was to include nurses “To attend the sick” and a “Matron…To supervise the nurses, bedding, &c.” There was to be one nurse for every ten patients, and later one matron for every hundred patients. The Congress expected women to fill those jobs, as shown by how in 1776 the northern wing of the army drafted soldiers’ wives for that work when “the Sick suffered much for Want of good female Nurses.”

That would remove Gen. Gates and Gen. Washington from the conversation—but then they weren’t really involved to begin with.