Nursing

“Military surgeons’ reception of women at the front was beclouded by internecine struggle within the medical profession over the standardization of medical training and practice (Schultz, 371). . . . the opposition among surgeons even to the idea of female hospital attendants in the first year of the war was fairly common” (376). . . . few women had the training their military superiors desired. In the first two years of the war, a status-anxious and poorly supplied corps of hospital surgeons was ripe to find a medically untrained and militarily naïve group of women a nuisance (373). . . . conflicts over bureaucratic inhumanity, morality, and corruption were pervasive. Nurses found no greater opportunity to individualize the suffering of their patients and thereby demonstrate their moral superiority to surgeons than in conflicts involving food” (382). . . Thus the two ways in which nurses individualized the suffering of their patients – in focusing on specific personal details and in narrowing the focus of their sphere of action – were meaningfully related: the former to give substance to the lives snatched cruelly and randomly by death, the latter to salvage personal effectiveness in an often hostile military bureaucracy” (384). . . . [Civil War nurses] also began to realize the professional implications of gender difference. . . And they began to see an ethical conundrum in a system that equated medical authority with professionalism. Nurses observed that surgeons’ insistence on maintaining hospital protocol sometimes resulted in poor patient care. If the power and authority granted to surgeons permitted lapses in the standard of practice – through corruption, bureaucratic inefficiency, and depersonalization – then the concept of professionalism itself, through which all surgeons were accorded power and authority, lacked the essential humanitarian ingredient in medicine of putting the patient first. . . . women rejected the values that formed the basis of medical authority as defined by surgeons” (388-89).