The biography of Clara Barton (whose full name was Clarissa Harlowe Barton) cannot be written without also writing in some measure the history of the American Red Cross as well as that of the history of nursing. This paper examines the work of this founder of the American Red Cross, looking at both her own life and especially at her work during the major battles of the American Civil War. In order to set her work in the proper historical framework, it also provides a very brief overview of the history of nursing as a profession, a profession with which she is û along with Florence Nightingale û responsible in many ways for creating in its contemporary form and at the American Red Cross, of which Barton is the founder.
Barton, born in 1821 and dying in 1912, dedicated her life to humanitarian causes, of which the Red Cross was perhaps the single most noteworthy example. Born in Oxford, Massachusetts, and educated mostly at home, chiefly by her two brothers and two sisters, she became first a teacher and the founder of various free schools in New Jersey.
Her later success could not easily have been predicted from her early childhood, when she was an almost unnaturally shy child, timid and afraid of strangers and speaking with a lisp that made her even shier. She might not have been able to achieve what she did without the constant encouragement of her large family and without an incident that happened when she was nine years old. That year her brother David fell when he was working on the rafters of the barn. He developed fevers and a headache from the fall and doctors prescribed the then-popular panacea of applying a leech to remove his ôbad Bloodö. Barton took over the task of treating David, several times a day lifting a slimy black leech from a glass jar and applying it to her brotherÆs neck until it became so bloated with blood that it lost its grip and fell back into a jar of water. She continued to nurse her brother for...