Wartime and Military Nursing

by

Katrin Schultheiss

• LAST MODIFIED: 17 April 2025
• DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780197768723-0012

Introduction

Caring for wounded and sick soldiers during wartime is as old as war itself. Before the transformation of medical care spurred by the bacteriological revolution of the nineteenth century, much of that care consisted of hastily performed amputations and dressing of wounds by male surgeons or fellow soldiers. Women were often present as “camp followers,” cooking food, washing clothes, and providing general care for wounded and sick soldiers. By the early nineteenth century, many military hospitals in Europe and the United States were staffed by female religious orders as well as male orderlies. Over the course of the nineteenth century, nursing emerged as a distinctly feminine role within the explicitly masculine world of warfare. Serving as nurses during wartime appealed to many secular women who were eager to challenge the pervasive ideology of separate spheres. In the middle decades of the nineteenth century, major developments in understandings of disease transmission, infection, and medical and surgical practice, as well as sanitation, hygiene, and diet, transformed nursing care. England’s Florence Nightingale has long been credited with bringing these insights to bear on the dire conditions faced by sick and injured British soldiers during the Crimean War. Her implementation of the scientific principles of hygiene and nutrition garnered respect from the medical profession and the military as well as widespread public praise. The scale and brutality of warfare in the second half of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth prompted new efforts to organize and improve care for wounded and sick combatants. In 1864, Henri Dunant founded what would later be called the International Committee of the Red Cross, leading to the establishment of national Red Cross organizations, which became vehicles for organizing wartime nurses. The turn of the twentieth century marked the beginning of the integration of nurses into military health services, with many countries establishing “nursing corps” attached to branches of the national military. Despite these developments, military nursing—like nursing in general—remained a strongly gendered occupation shaped by assumptions about women’s natural capacity for nurturing and self-sacrifice. The struggle for the recognition of military nursing as a bona fide profession rose to the fore during and immediately after the First World War. The surge of female volunteer nurses during the war, many of whom underwent only a few weeks of training, undermined career military nurses’ efforts to promote and protect professional standards. By the Second World War, nursing was fully incorporated into the medical services of countries with modern militaries, though it remained an explicitly feminine career path into the postwar period. Men served as medical attendants or orderlies—as they had throughout the nineteenth century—rather than nurses. National military health services began admitting men as full-fledged members of their nursing corps in the 1950s and 1960s.

General Histories

There is no general history of military and wartime nursing. The few overviews of wartime and military nursing that exist focus on a single country and start in the middle of the nineteenth century or in the twentieth century. For example, Sarnecky 1999 offers a general history of US Army nursing. Like much of the history of nursing, it is written by a retired military nurse. The health services of some national militaries provide information about the history of their nursing corps on their websites. For example, Historical Timeline of Nurses and Nursing in the Military and US Navy provide useful introductions to the history of US military nursing, including historical images, while Smolenski, et al. 2005, produced by the US Air Force, offers a quick summary of the history of nursing in that branch of the military. The history of British military nursing has received fairly extensive coverage by historians. Summers 1988 was the first scholarly study the origins of British military nursing and remains a foundational work. Brooks and Hallett 2015 includes a range of essays about wartime nursing mostly centered on nurses in the Commonwealth, from the middle of the nineteenth century through the middle of the twentieth, while Mackie 2001 focuses on the history of the British Princess Mary Royal Airforce Nursing Service. Other national histories of military nursing include Bassett 1992 on Australian military nursing, Rogers 2003 on New Zealand nurses, and Tsirvoulis and Antonakopoulos 2024, which provides a very brief account of military nursing in Greece. While most general histories offer a straightforward narrative of the evolution of wartime and military nursing, Threat 2015 integrates the subject into broader social history by focusing on race and gender integration within American military nursing.

• Bassett, Jan. Guns and Brooches: Australian Army Nursing from the Boer War to the Gulf War. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992.

  A detailed and comprehensive survey of the experiences of the 9,000 Australian army nurses who served in the many conflicts of the twentieth century from the Boer War to the Vietnam War, placing their work in the context of changing military organization as well as broader Australian social history.

• Brooks, Jane, and Christine E. Hallett, eds. One Hundred Years of Wartime Nursing Practices, 1854–1953. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2015.

  Collection of essays covering the one hundred years from the Crimean War through the Korean War with an emphasis on nurses serving with the British and Commonwealth armies. Also includes an essay on American Civil War nursing and one on Norwegian nurses in the Korean War.

• “Historical Timeline of Nurses and Nursing in the Military.”

  Useful chronology of nursing in the American military from its informal roots in the American Revolution to the present presented by the official website of the US Military Health System. Includes links to official sites of the Army Nurse Corps, the Air Force Total Nursing Force, and the Navy Nurse Corps.

• Mackie, Mary. Sky Wards: A History of the Princess Mary’s Royal Air Force Nursing Service. London: Robert Hale, 2001.

  General history of the British Air Force Nursing Service from its origins in the aftermath of World War I to the end of the twentieth century.

• Rogers, Anna. While You’re Away: New Zealand Nurses at War, 1899–1945. Auckland, New Zealand: Auckland University Press, 2003.

  Traces the experiences of New Zealand nurses in 20th-century conflicts up to the end of World War II with an emphasis on first-person accounts and relations between New Zealand nurses and the British military.

• Sarnecky, Mary. A History of the US Army Nurse Corps. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999.

  Written by a retired Army Nurse Corps colonel, this is one of the few general histories of the US Army Nurse Corps. Strong on the details of the daily experiences of nurses in the Corps.

• Smolenski, Mary C., Donald G. Smith, and James S. Nanney. A Fit Fighting Force: The Air Force Nursing Services—Chronology. Washington, DC: Office of the Air Force Surgeon General, 2005.

  A short overview of the history of the US Air Force Nursing Services.

• Summers, Anne. Angels and Citizens: British Women as Military Nurses (1854–1914). London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1988.

  Examines the origins of British military nursing in the Crimean War and its emergence as a formal nursing corps attached to the army during the Anglo-Boer War and in the years leading up to the First World War.

• Threat, Charissa J. Nursing Civil Rights: Gender and Race in the Army Nurse Corps. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2015.

  DOI: 10.5406/illinois/9780252039201.001.0001

  Examines the 20th-century struggles of African American women to desegregate the Army Nurse Corps as well as the efforts of white men to be accepted as military nurses.

• Tsirvoulis, Ionnis, and George Antonakopoulos. “A Brief History of Military Nursing in Greece.” International Journal of Caring Sciences 17.1 (January–February 2024): 575–579.

  Short overview of military nursing in Greece from its roots in the Hellenic Red Cross in 1877 to the modern-day School for Nursing Officers, which trains nurses for the armed forces.

• US Navy. “The History of the Navy Nurse Corps.” n.d.

  The US Navy website provides a comprehensive general history of the Navy Nurse Corps, which was founded in 1908.