ALL POSTS

For most, their pantheon of nursing reformers from the 19th century is a list containing precisely two people: Florence Nightingale, whose superhuman efforts during the Crimean War translated into a drive in England to make nursing a respectable occupation for middle class women, and Clara Barton, whose equally driven work during the American Civil War ultimately culminated in the creation of the American Red Cross. And certainly, these figures are both foundational, but the

Lavinia Waterhouse (1809–1890) lived at the intersection of a tangle of ideas that, to the twenty-first-century mind, have no business...