Nursing Before The War
The profession of nursing before the Civil War had not been developed at all which showed in its extreme amount of disorganization
- Before the Civil War, there were no formal nursing schools and only 150 hospitals
- There were very few medical supplies, a minimal number of nurses, and not enough surgeons
- The conditions in hospitals were horrible and everything was very disorganized
- The profession of nursing consisted of only males
- Walt Whitman described a hospital that he visited in the very early stages of the war, "quite crowded upstairs and down, everything impromptu, no system, all bad enough, but I have no doubt the best that can be done; all the wounds pretty bad, some frightful, the men in their old clothes, unclean and bloody"