page_title: United States Army Nurse Corps
section_title: Pre-1901
hierarchical_section_title: United States Army Nurse Corps / History / Pre-1901
caption_attribution_description: English: Five American Civil War nurses at 1916 Massachussetts encampment; Helen E. Smith, Susan C. Mills, Margaret Hamilton, Mary E. Smith, and Lovisa Tyson.
context_page_description: The United States Army Nurse Corps was formally established by the U.S. Congress in 1901. It is one of the six medical special branches of officers which – along with medical enlisted soldiers – comprise the Army Medical Department.
  The ANC is the nursing service for the U.S. Army and provides nursing staff in support of the Department of Defense medical plans. The ANC is composed entirely of registered nurses.
context_section_description: Nurses served in Washington's Army during the Revolutionary War. Although the women who tended the sick and wounded during the Revolutionary War were not nurses as known in the modern sense, they blazed the trail for later generations when, in 1873, civilian hospitals in America began operating recognized schools of nursing.
  After the Revolutionary War, Congress drastically reduced the size of the medical service. Patient care was performed by soldiers detailed from the companies. There was no centralized medical direction by a formally organized medical department until the War of 1812. The Army Medical Department was reestablished by Congress under the direction of a Surgeon General, Dr. Joseph Lovell. The Army Reorganization Act of 1818 marked the beginning of the modem Medical Department of the United States Army.
  Two months after the Civil War began on 12 April 1861, the Secretary of War Simon Cameron appointed Dorothea Lynde Dix as superintendent of women nurses for the Union Army. Some of the women, before reporting for assignment, received a short course in nursing under the direction of Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell, the first woman to receive a medical degree in the United States.
  Some of the nurses who worked in the Union hospitals were not on the Army payroll but were sponsored by the United States Sanitary Commission or by volunteer agencies. Their work was largely limited to preparing diets, supervising the distribution of supplies furnished by volunteer groups, and housekeeping details. 
  During the 1898 Spanish–American War, the Army hired female civilian nurses to help with the wounded. Dr. Anita Newcomb McGee was appointed Acting Assistant Surgeon in the U.S. Army. After the war ended, McGee pursued the establishment of a permanent nurse corps. She wrote the section of the Army Reorganization Act legislation pertaining to nursing and is now known as the founder of the Army Nurse Corps. In all, more than 1,500 women nurses worked as contract nurses during that 1898 conflict.
  Race and sex played central roles. The ANC was for white women only, and fought hard to exclude or minimize the numbers of black women until 1947. They excluded all men until the Korean war when male doctors began to emphasize the need for nurses in the front lines, and this meant male nurses.
caption: Five American Civil War nurses at 1916 Massachusetts encampment; Helen E. Smith, Susan C. Mills, Margaret Hamilton, Mary E. Smith, and Lovisa Tyson.
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