Page:A short history of nursing - Lavinia L Dock (1920).djvu/166

150 A Short History of Nursing pital, Boston (1892). In no other country save Ireland do religious Sisters take as active and progressive a part in all nursing movements as in ours. The Civil War gave an immense impetus to nursing as well as to general organization among . women. When it broke out in 1861 Nursing during the there were practically no trained nurses Civil War ^j^g country. Hastily the hospitals tried to meet the need by calling in women to take short intensive training courses, and a good deal of helpful work was done in this way. Religious orders, both Catholic and Protestant, opened their wards to war workers, and Dr. Elizabeth Black- well sent nearly a hundred volunteers to Bellevue hospital. It was Dr. Blackwell, also, who gave the first call to women in New York for organized war work. The association which resulted merged later with other volunteer bodies in the Sanitary Commission, which became actually a Red Cross Society of the highest excellence, without the name. Its leaders had, throughout the war, the closest correspondence with Miss Nightingale, who coun- selled and advised them in every development. Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell should have been made the head of the war nursing work thus co-opera- tively carried on, but so intense was the jealousy