Pre-1901 Nurses served in Washington's Army during the
Revolutionary War. Although the women who tended the sick and wounded during the Revolutionary War were not nurses as they are known in the modern sense, they blazed the trail for later generations. In 1873, civilian hospitals in America began operating as recognized schools of nursing. marked the beginning of the modem Medical Department of the United States Army. In all, more than 1,500 women nurses worked as contract nurses during that 1898 conflict. Race and sex played central roles. The ANC was for white women only and fought hard to exclude or minimize the number of black women until 1947. They excluded all men until the Korean War, when male doctors began to emphasize the need for nurses on the front lines, and this meant male nurses.
1901–1917 The Army Nurse Corps became a permanent corps of the Medical Department under the Army Reorganization Act (31 Stat. 753) passed by Congress on 2 February 1901. Professionalization was a dominant theme during the Progressive Era, because it valued expertise and hierarchy over ad-hoc volunteering in the name of civic duty. The Army Nurse Corps (female) became a permanent corps of the Medical Department under the Army Reorganization Act (31 Stat. 753) on 2 February 1901. Nurses were appointed in the Regular Army for a three-year period, although nurses were not actually commissioned as officers in the Regular Army until forty-six years later-on 16 April 1947.
World War I In
World War I (American participation from 1917–18), the military recruited 20,000 registered nurses (all women) for military and navy duty in 58 military hospitals. They helped staff 47 ambulance companies that operated on the Western Front. More than 10,000 served overseas, while 5,400 nurses enrolled in the Army's new School of Nursing. Key decisions were made by
Jane Delano, director of the Red Cross Nursing Service,
Mary Adelaide Nutting, president of the American Federation of Nurses, and
Annie Goodrich, dean of the Army School of Nursing.
Interwar period Demobilization reduced the two corps to skeleton units designed to be expanded should a new war take place. Eligibility at this time included being female, white, unmarried, a volunteer, and a graduate from a civilian nursing school. In 1920, the Army Reorganization Act granted Army nurses relative rank, with their relative standing in the army corresponding to the standing of commissioned officers, although the nurses themselves were not commissioned officers. The “assimilated ranks” of major, lieutenant, and captain were authorized. Staff nurses were appointed as second lieutenants, the superintendent was appointed as a major, the assistant superintendent and directors were captains, and chief nurses were first lieutenants. The nurses were also authorized to wear insignia by the Act. Flikke remained in the Army after the war. After 12 years at Walter Reed Army Hospital in Washington, D.C., she was promoted to captain and became the Assistant Superintendent of Nurses. She succeeded in creating new billets for occupational therapists and dieticians. Flikke became Superintendent, with the rank of Major, in 1938.
World War II , Bastogne, Belgium (18 December 2004). At the start of the war in December 1941, there were fewer than 1,000 nurses in the Army Nurse Corps and 700 in the Navy Nurse Corps. All were women. Colonel Flikke's small headquarters in 1942, though it contained only 4 officers and 25 civilians, supervised the vast wartime expansion of nurses, in cooperation with the Red Cross. She only took unmarried women aged 22–30 who had their RN training from civilian schools. These nurses were commissioned for a term that lasted the duration of the war plus six months, but they were discharged if they married or became pregnant. Due to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941, the
United States entered the Pacific part of World War II. Along with this military effort was the work of the
Flying Tigers in Kunming, China, under
Claire Chennault. Nurses were thus needed in China to serve the U.S. Army. These nurses were recruited among the Chinese nurses residing in China, particularly the English-speaking nurses who fled Hong Kong (a British colony) to
free China due to the
Japanese invasion of Hong Kong on 8 December 1941. The Hong Kong nurses were trained by the Department of Medical Services (directed by Dr. Percy
Selwyn Selwyn-Clarke) of the Government of
Hong Kong. They took up Nursing positions at the
Flying Tigers (Rebecca Chan Chung 鍾陳可慰, Daisy Pui-Ying Chan 陳培英), U.S. Army (Rebecca Chan Chung 鍾陳可慰, Daisy Chan 陳培英, Cynthia Chan 陳靜渝), Chinese Red Cross (
Elsie Chin Yuen Seetoo, Irene Yu 余秀芬) and China National Aviation Corporation (Rebecca Chan Chung 鍾陳可慰, Irene Yu 余秀芬). Cynthia Chan 陳靜渝 is the elder sister of Anna Chan 陳香梅 (
Mrs. Chennault). Only a few
African American nurses were admitted to the Army Nurse Corps.
Mabel Keaton Staupers, who worked for the
National Association of Colored Graduate Nurses with help from
Eleanor Roosevelt, pressured the Army to admit African American nurses in 1941. The first black nurse admitted to the program was
Della H. Raney who was commissioned as a second lieutenant in April 1941. The limit on black nurses was 48 in 1941 and they were mostly
segregated from white nurses and soldiers. The
Cadet Nurse Corps was created because of a nationwide shortage of nurses. With over 8 million soldiers, sailors, and airmen, the needs were more than double those of World War I. Hundreds of new military hospitals were constructed for the expected flow of casualties. Fearing a massive wave of combat casualties once Japan was invaded in late 1945, President
Franklin D. Roosevelt called on Congress early in 1945 for permission to draft nurses. However, with the rapid collapse of Germany early in 1945, and the limitation of the war in the Pacific to a few islands, the draft was not needed and was never enacted. meeting with
United States Army nurses ca. 1944 at
St Stephen's Cathedral. By the end of the war, the Army and Army Air Forces (AAF) had 54,000 nurses, and the Navy had 11,000—all women. Some 217 black nurses served in all-black Army medical units. The AAF was virtually autonomous by 1942 and likewise was its Nurse Corps. Much larger numbers of enlisted men served as medics. These men were in effect practical nurses who handled routine care under the direction of nurse officers. Likewise many enlisted
Wacs and
Wafs served in military hospitals. Medical advances greatly increased survival rates for the wounded: 96% of the 670,000 wounded soldiers and sailors who made it to a field hospital staffed by nurses and doctors survived their injuries. Amputations were seldom necessary to combat gangrene. Penicillin and sulfa drugs proved highly successful in this regard. Nurses were deeply involved with post-operative recovery procedures, air evacuation, and new techniques in psychiatry and anesthesia. Upon Flikke's retirement in 1943, she was succeeded by
Florence A. Blanchfield, who successfully promoted new laws in 1947, that established the Army, Navy, and Air Force Nurse Corps on a permanent basis, giving the nurses regular commissions on exactly the same terms as male officers. A month before she retired in 1947, Blanchfield became the first woman to hold a regular Army commission.
Prisoners of war Korea During the
Korean War, Army nurses would once again treat the wounded. Nurses would staff MASH units and standard emplaced hospitals in Japan and Korea. Nurses were on the forefront of battlefield medicine during the conflict, playing a major role in the treatment of the wounded U.N. forces within mere minutes or hours of the wounds being inflicted. In September 1955,
President Eisenhower suffered a heart attack while on vacation near Denver. He was hospitalized at
Fitzsimons Army Medical Center. During his six weeks of recovery, Ike talked to his Army nurses. He discovered their quarters were substandard, that nurses rotated overseas more often than other soldiers and they were forced to leave the military at age fifty-five. Nurses were also promoted more slowly than other soldiers. Ike directed the corps be led by a brigadier general and that the other issues be corrected.
Vietnam The Army Nurse Corps stopped being all-female in 1955; that year Edward L.T. Lyon was the first man to receive a commission in the Army Nurse Corps. During the Vietnam War many Army nurses would see deployment to South East Asia. Army nurses would staff all major Army hospitals in the theater, including
Cam Ranh Bay,
Da Nang, and
Saigon. Vietnam would be the first major deployment of men as nurses into the combat theater, as men could be located in more hazardous locations than what was considered safe for women. Many Army nurses faced enemy fire for the first time due to the unconventional nature of the conflict and eight female and one male nurse would die in the conflict. 1LT
Sharon Lane was the only nurse to die by enemy fire during the Vietnam War when on 8 June 1969, she was mortally wounded when a rocket hit her facility, the 312th Evacuation Hospital. On at least one occasion, the US Army hospital at Cam Ranh Bay was assaulted and severely damaged, with a loss of both patient and staff life.
Modern Nurse Corps Army Nurses are deployed all over the world, participating in humanitarian missions, and supporting the
Global War on Terror. The Nurse Corps continues to operate as a part of the Army Medical Department. Most training is conducted at
Fort Sam Houston, Texas. ==Insignia and badges==