From the History Channel, This Day in History: "Clara Barton and Adolphus Solomons found the American Red Cross, an organization established to provide humanitarian aid to victims of wars and national disasters in congruence with the International Red Cross.
Barton, born in Massachusetts in 1821, worked with the sick and wounded during the American Civil War and became known as the "Angel of the Battlefield" for her tireless dedication. In 1865, President Abraham Lincoln commissioned her to search for lost prisoners of war and with the extensive records she had compiled during the war she succeeded in identifying thousands of the Union dead at the Andersonville prisoner-of-war camp.
She was in Europe in 1870 when the Franco-Prussian War broke out, and she went behind the German lines to work for the International Red Cross. The American Red Cross received its first U.S. federal charter in 1900. Barton headed the organization into her 80's and died in 1912."
Remarkable woman with the constitution of a horse. How did she not catch something deadly working in field hospitals and live to be 80?
ReplyDeleteMost of the people who died during the Civil War (There's an oxymoron for you. What war was ever civil?) were carried off by infections, gangrene, etc. Those are not generally contagious.
ReplyDeleteWhat amazes me is that Oliver Wendell Holmes, the elder, nearly lost his medical license over his suggestion that people might live longer if the doctors washed their hands between patients. Charles Meigs insisted that a doctor was a gentleman, and a gentleman's hands are always clean.
So much for the germ theory!
I was thinking typhus, cholera, TB, and not gangrene. Your doctor sounds like Scottish Dr. Lister, a surgeon, who was ridiculed for insisting on a clean apron and hands before proceeding to the next operation. More of his patients survived, so the others stopped laughing. From him comes carbolic acid and cold tar soap. I wonder if the original Listerine borrowed his name to imply germ killing properties of their product.
ReplyDeleteWhen I was doing the research for my magnum opus ("Angels of Mercy" - presentation for a Nurse's Week luncheon), I bought three books - "Bleed, Blister And Purge," "Guts, Gangrene and Glory," and "This Republic of Suffering."
ReplyDeleteI can recommend all three, although the author/publisher of "Guts" used a rather odd typeface and layout that takes some getting used to.
I'm going to look for these. Should make a nice change from the political & history books I usually read which can be stomach turning at times. At least these are in the spirit of healing. BTW, the mining book is a good one. You really do find the best things.
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