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Dregs of female society
Prior to the Civil War, the reputation of nurses were called the “dregs of female society” which caused women to avoid the occupation. Many of them were middle aged widows with lower class status, and working due to financial hardship. -
Period: to
1800-1850
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Friedrich Wilhelm Adam Sertürner
In 1804, Friedrich Sertürner a German pharmacist is believed to be the first ever to isolate morphine from opium. -
French invasion of Russia
During Napoleon's retreat from Moscow in 1812, more French soldiers died of typhus than were killed by the Russians. A major epidemic occurred in Ireland between 1816 and 1819, during the famine caused by a world-wide reduction in temperature known as the "Year Without a Summer." An estimated 100,000 Irish perished. -
Rene Laennec
French physician that invented the stethoscope in 1816. While working at the Hopital Necker pioneered its use in diagnosing various chest conditions. In 1826 he dies of tuberculosis. -
First cholera pandemic
1817–1826: The first cholera pandemic, though previously restricted, began in Bengal, and then spread across India by 1820. Hundreds of thousands of Indians, and ten thousand British troops died during this pandemic. Scholars usually refer to a wave of seven cholera pandemics, and generally describe them as occurring 1817-23, 1826-37, 1846-63, 1865-75, 1881-96, and 1902-23, and 1961-present. -
Florence Nightingale
Florence Nightingale was born into a rich, upper-class, well-connected British family at the Villa Colombaia near the Porta Romana at Bellosguardo Florence, Italy. She was named after the city of her birth. -
Clara Barton
Was born in 1821. At age 60, she founded the American Red Cross in 1881 and led it for the next 23 years. -
Second cholera pandemic
A second cholera pandemic reached Hungary killing over 100,000 people, and 150,000 people in Egypt that year. In 1832 it reached London and the United Kingdom where more than 55,000 people died. In London, the disease claimed 6,536 victims and came to be known as "King Cholera" in Paris. -
National vaccination board
In 1837 the National Vaccination Board was developed in England. In Victorian England there were continued problems with sanitation and overcrowding that led to periodic outbreaks. -
Dorothea Lynde Dix
Dorthea Dix begins her investigation and advocacy for the insane from New England to the South, in 1840. In 1848, Dorothea Dix visited North Carolina and called for reform in the care of mentally ill patients. In 1849, when the North Carolina State Medical Society was formed, the construction of an institution in the capital, Raleigh, for the care of mentally ill patients was authorized. The hospital, named in honor of Dorothea Dix, opened in 1856 -
Mary Eliza Mahoney
Mary Eliza Mahoney was born, and was the first African American to study and work as a professionally trained nurse in the United States, graduating in 1879. -
First successful anesthesia "the day pain died"
World Anesthesia Day commemorates the first successful demonstration of ether anesthesia on October 16, 1846. This ranks as one of the most significant events in the history of Medicine and took place at the Massachusetts General Hospital, home of the Harvard School of Medicine. The discovery made it possible for patients to obtain the benefits of surgical treatment without the pain associated with an operation. -
Florence Nightingale's most famous contribution came during the Crimean War
Florence Nightingale visits Kaiserwerth, Germany to study and form the most famous contributin during the Crimean War.
