irst
regular Camp Hospitals. During her war with the Moors she caused a
large number of tents to be furnished at her own charge, with the
requisite medicines, appliances, and attendants for the wounded and
sick of her army. These were known as the "Queen's Hospitals," and
formed the inception of all the tender care given in army hospitals by
the most enlightened nations of to-day.

It is but a few years since Christendom was thrilled by the heroism of
a young English girl of high position, Florence Nightingale, who
having passed through the course of training required for hospital
nurses, voluntarily went out to the Crimea at the time when English
soldiers, wounded and sick, were dying by scores and thousands without
medicine or care, broke over the red-tape rules of the army, and with
her corps of women nurses, brought life in place of death, winning the
gratitude and admiration of her country and mankind by her
self-sacrifice and her powers of organization. Rev. Henry Kinglake, in
his "History of the Crimea," says she brought a priceless
reinforcement of brain power to the nation at a time when the brains
of Englishmen had given signs of inanition.

A few years later brought our own civil war, and the wonderful
sanitary commission, more familiarly known as "The Sanitary," the
public records of which are a part of the history of the war; its
sacrifices and its successes have burned themselves deep into the
hearts of thousands upon thousands. Its fairs in New York, New
England, and the Northwest, were the wonders of the world in the
variety and beauty of their exhibits and the vast sums realized from
them. Scarcely a woman in the nation, from the girl of tender
years,[12] to the aged matron of ninety, whose trembling hands scraped
lint or essayed to knit socks and mittens for "the boys in blue," but
knows its work, for of it they were a part. But not a hundred of all
those thousands who toiled with willing hands, and who, at every
battle met anew to prepare or send off stores, knows that to one of
her own sex was the formation of the Great Sanitary due.[13]

Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell, returning to this country from England about
the time of the breaking out of the war, fresh from an acquaintance
with Miss Nightingale, and filled with her enthusiasm, at once called
an informal meeting at the New York Infirmary[14] for Women and
Children, where, on April 25th, 1861, the germ of the sanitary, known
as the Ladies' Central