N108: Transition to the Registered Professional Nurse

N108: Transition to the Registered Professional Nurse Role Study Guide of 171 Clara Barton Barton became known as “the angel of the battlefield” after she provided care to soldiers during the American Civil War. In 1882, she founded the American Red Cross. Barton was born in 1821 on Christmas Day in Oxford, Massachusetts. Her father, who was a farmer and soldier, told her stories about his time in the army. These stories instilled in her a lifelong interest in military affairs. Young Clara nursed her brother David, who had been injured in an accident, for two years. Barton became a teacher at the age of fifteen. She moved to Washington, DC in 1854 and began her war service when the Sixth Massachusetts Regiment arrived in Washington. The regiment had lost its baggage during battle, leading Barton to find ways to supply their needs. After the Battle of the Bull Run, reports of supply shortages in the field caught Barton’s attention. She advertised for provisions in the newspaper and established a distributing agency to handle the donations. In 1862, the government gave Barton permission to accompany sick transports and aid the sick and wounded. After the war, she supervised a federal search for missing soldiers and delivered lectures on her war experiences. She met Susan B. Anthony, which began her long association with the suffrage movement. She also met Frederick Douglass and became involved in activism for the rights of former slaves. In 1869, Barton was in Europe during the Franco-Prussian conflict and worked with the International Red Cross to distribute supplies in France and Germany. The German Emperor gave her the Iron Cross of Merit. When she returned home, she became involved in trying to establish the American Red Cross. Her efforts to educate the public and lobby cabinet heads and Congressmen were successful. In 1881, the National Society of the Red Cross was formed with Barton as the president. She directed the efforts of the organization for the next 23 years and was called “little lone lady in black silk.” Dorothea Dix Dix was appointed to supervise the Union “nurse” volunteers by the Secretary of War. She was a Boston schoolteacher well known for her humanitarian efforts on behalf of the mentally ill. The Civil War had opened work in hospitals to ladies of the upper class for the first time. There were 6,000 Union volunteers and only “plain-looking women” were allowed to be nurses. Louisa May Alcott and Walt Whitman were volunteers. “Mother” Mary Ann Bickerdyke was another who advocated on behalf of soldiers. Harriet Tubman Tubman, who was called “Moses” by the hundreds of slaves she helped escape slavery, was the most famous leader of the Underground Railroad. The Underground Railroad was an elaborate series of houses, tunnels, and roads set up by abolitionists and former slaves to assist slaves escaping to free states or Canada. Tubman was born a slave but escaped using the Underground Railroad. She decided to join the Underground Railroad after the Fugitive Slave Act was passed by Congress in 1850. Tubman’s first expedition was in 1851 when she brought her sister and sister’s children north. Between that trip and the start of the Civil War, Tubman travelled south 18 times and assisted close to 300 slaves, including her own parents in 1857. ©2017 Achieve Test Prep Page 12

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