The Continental Congress’s Plans for Nurses

Yesterday I reproduced a paragraph from a U.S. military webpage that contained four quotations about Continental Army nurses attributed to Gen. Horatio Gates, Gen. George Washington, and a plan sent [by Washington’s office?] to the Continental Congress.

However, none of those quoted phrases appear in Washington’s correspondence. So where did they come from?

On 19 July 1775 the Continental Congress appointed a committee “to report the method of establishing an hospital” for its army besieging Boston.

The three delegates named to that committee were Francis Lewis of New York (shown here), Robert Treat Paine of Massachusetts, and Henry Middleton of South Carolina.

(This committee was formed two days before Washington wrote to the Congress asking for the hospital to be “immediately taken into Consideration.” The Congress was already ahead of him.)

On 24 July that committee submitted its recommendations, and three days later the Congress voted to establish a medical department for its army. Among the personnel it provided for were:

Surgeons, apothecary and mates,
To visit and attend the sick, and the mates to obey the orders of the physicians, surgeons and apothecary.

Matron. To superintend the nurses, bedding, &c.

Nurses. To attend the sick, and obey the matron’s orders.

Later in the day, the Congress agreed there should be “one nurse to every 10 sick.” It also named the man they thought best suited to direct the medical department: Dr. Benjamin Church, Jr. Church lasted about two months before being exposed as a British spy.

Be that as it may, that’s the official beginning of the American army’s nursing corps. (There were women nursing sick and wounded men from the New England army before that, starting with volunteers on the first day of the war and including the first hospitals.)

That July 1775 resolution of the Congress looks like the real source of two of the four quoted phrases:

• “a matron to supervise the nurses, bedding, etc.”—not exactly from the official record but recognizable.
• nurses “to attend the sick and obey the matron’s orders.”

The reproduced passage attributes those quoted phrases to a request from Gen. Washington. But those words weren’t generated by the commander-in-chief or his staff. They came out of the Congress. There’s a hero-worshipping tendency among American authors to attribute to Washington a lot that we should credit to the institutions of democratic government.

Almost two years later, on 7 Apr 1777, the Congress again discussed how to organize its army hospitals. By this time the war had spread, so that department had grown. Its managers had a better idea of what worked. Among the provisions the Congress approved that day were:

That a matron be allowed to every hundred sick or wounded, who shall take care that the provisions are properly prepared; that the wards, beds, and utensils be kept in neat order, and that the most exact oeconomy be observed in her department:

That a nurse be allowed for every ten sick or wounded, who shall be under the direction of the matron:

This resolution is the source of the third of the four quotations (with “allotted” substituted for the original “allowed”). Those words indeed appear in a plan submitted to the Congress, as the army webpage says, but that plan was written two years into the war, not in the summer of 1775.

TOMORROW: The fourth quotation.