“The Sick suffered much for Want of good female Nurses”

The fourth quotation to track down from that U.S. Army webpage is the first to appear in its paragraph about the creation of the Continental Congress’s nursing policy:

Shortly after the establishment of the Continental Army on June 14, 1775, Maj. Gen. Horatio Gates reported to Commander-in-Chief George Washington that “the sick suffered much for want of good female Nurses.”

The way that webpage lays out events, Gates’s warning prompted the Congress to hire nurses.

However, as I showed yesterday, the Congress established its standards for an army medical department in July 1775 without needing guidance from the generals at Cambridge. 

The phrase “the sick suffered much for want of good female Nurses” doesn’t appear on Founders Online, which includes all of Washington’s incoming and outgoing correspondence during the war.

It doesn’t appear in the Journals of the Continental Congress, still searchable through the Library of Congress’s old American Memory website, where we can find the paragraph’s other phrases (approximately) because those were part of official resolutions.

I tracked the phrase in question to Peter Force’s American Archives (digitized and searchable here) and the Orderly Book of the Northern Army, at Ticonderoga and Mt. Independence, published by Joel Munsell in 1859.

Not surprisingly, yet another committee of the Congress was involved. In November 1776, the Congress sent two delegates—Richard Stockton of New Jersey (shown above) and George Clymer of Pennsylvania—to northern New York to assess the Continental forces in the aftermath of the collapse of the invasion of Canada.

Stockton and Clymer consulted with Gen. Gates, Gen. Philip Schuyler, and commissary general Joseph Trumbull before reporting back to the Congress on 27 November. That body named a larger committee to take up the discussion and report back, which meant the original report wasn’t entered into the Congress’s journal.

The first committee report, as printed in the Munsell book, includes this about medical care:

Your Committee also beg leave further to Report, that they have visited the General Hospital for the Northern Army, situated at Fort George; that there is a Range of Buildings erected convenient for the Purpose, which on the 20th of October last contained about four hundred Sick, including those wounded and sent from General [Benedict] Arnold’s Fleet; that they were sufficiently supplied with fresh Mutton and Indian Meal, but wanted Vegetables; that the Director-General in that Department [Dr. Samuel Stringer] obtained a large Supply of Medicines, but the Sick suffered much for Want of good female Nurses and comfortable Bedding; many of those poor Creatures being obliged to lay upon the bare Boards. Your Committee endeavoured to procure Straw as the best temporary Expedient; but they earnestly recommend it to the Attention of Congress, that a Quantity of Bedding be speedily furnished,…

The American Archives version has fewer capital letters, more italics, and one added “that.”

Thus, a Revolutionary War source did say “the Sick suffered much for Want of good female Nurses.” But that source wasn’t Gen. Gates writing to Gen. Washington on or shortly after 14 June 1775. It was Richard Stockton and George Clymer reporting to the Continental Congress in November 1776.

That report came more than a year after the Congress authorized hiring nurses for its hospitals; it didn’t prompt that hiring. Stockton and Clymer were actually describing an anomaly in the army’s medical establishment. Up in the frontier fortifications along Lake Champlain and Lake George, there weren’t enough women to staff the army hospitals as commanders had come to expect.

In fact, back on 13 July 1776 Gen. Schuyler had ordered:

One woman from each company of each of the Pennsylvania Battalions now at this post, to be draughted as soon as possible, and sent to the General Hospital at Fort George. They will have the customary allowance of provisions, and so forth from Dr. Stringer, director of the hospital there.

The Continental Army expected soldiers’ wives to be ready to serve as nurses.

TOMORROW: How the error appeared and metastasized.