United States Army Nurse Corps
The United States Army Nurse Corps was formally established by the U.S. Congress in 1901. It is one of the six medical special branches of officers which – along with medical enlisted soldiers – comprise the Army Medical Department. The ANC is the nursing service for the U.S. Army and provides nursing staff in support of the Department of Defense medical plans. The ANC is composed entirely of Registered Nurses and Advanced Practice Registered Nurses.
Mission
The USANC states its mission is "To provide responsive, innovative, and evidence-based nursing care integrated on the Army Medicine Team to enhance readiness, preserve life and function, and promote health and wellness for all those entrusted to our care."Creed
The Army Nursing Corps Creed was written by Lt. Col. Leigh McGraw in December 2009:Qualifications
To qualify for the Army Nurse Corps, an applicant needs a Bachelor of Science in Nursing from an accredited program. AR 135-100, AR 135-101, AR 601-100, and applicable ANC circulars in the DA Circular 601-FY-X series list qualifications for entry.The ANC consists entirely of commissioned officers. Nurses who wish to serve as Army Nurses are required to hold an unrestricted Registered Nurse license prior to receiving a commission.
Leadership
The Chief of the Army Nurse Corps and the FORSCOM Command Surgeon is BG James D. Burk, while the Deputy Chief is COL Jodelle Schroeder.Specialties
;Areas of concentrationPublic Health Nurse – 66B
Psychiatric-Mental Health Nurse – 66C
Peri-Operative Nurse – 66E
Certified Registered Nurse Anesthetist – 66F
Obstetrics-Gynecologic Nurse – 66G
Medical-Surgical Nursing – 66H
Generalist Nurse – 66N; this is used to designate positions on organizational documents but is not held by the individual.
Family Nurse Practitioner – 66P
Additional Skill Identifiers ; designate additional areas of expertise or experience and are in addition to a basic nursing specialty.
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History
Pre-1901
Nurses served in Washington's Army during the Revolutionary War. Although the women who tended the sick and wounded during the Revolutionary War were not nurses as they are known in the modern sense, they blazed the trail for later generations. In 1873, civilian hospitals in America began operating as recognized schools of nursing.After the Revolutionary War, Congress drastically reduced the size of the medical service. Patient care was performed by soldiers detailed from the companies. There was no centralized medical direction by a formally organized medical department until the War of 1812. The Army Medical Department was re-established by Congress under the direction of a Surgeon General, Dr. Joseph Lovell. The Army Reorganization Act of 1818 marked the beginning of the modem Medical Department of the United States Army.
Two months after the Civil War began on 12 April 1861, the Secretary of War Simon Cameron appointed Dorothea Lynde Dix as superintendent of women nurses for the Union Army. Some of the women, before reporting for assignment, received a short course in nursing under the direction of Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell, the first woman to receive a medical degree in the United States.
Some of the nurses who worked in the Union hospitals were not on the Army payroll, but were sponsored by the United States Sanitary Commission or by volunteer agencies. Their work was largely limited to preparing diets, supervising the distribution of supplies furnished by volunteer groups, and housekeeping details.
During the 1898 Spanish–American War, the Army hired female civilian nurses to help with the wounded. Dr. Anita Newcomb McGee was appointed Acting Assistant Surgeon in the U.S. Army. After the war ended, McGee pursued the establishment of a permanent nurse corps. She wrote the section of the Army Reorganization Act legislation pertaining to nursing and is now known as the founder of the Army Nurse Corps. In all, more than 1,500 women nurses worked as contract nurses during that 1898 conflict.
Race and sex played central roles. The ANC was for white women only and fought hard to exclude or minimize the number of black women until 1947. They excluded all men until the Korean War, when male doctors began to emphasize the need for nurses on the front lines, and this meant male nurses.
1901–1917
The Army Nurse Corps became a permanent corps of the Medical Department under the Army Reorganization Act passed by Congress on 2 February 1901.Professionalization was a dominant theme during the Progressive Era, because it valued expertise and hierarchy over ad-hoc volunteering in the name of civic duty. The Army Nurse Corps became a permanent corps of the Medical Department under the Army Reorganization Act on 2 February 1901. Nurses were appointed in the Regular Army for a three-year period, although nurses were not actually commissioned as officers in the Regular Army until forty-six years later-on 16 April 1947. Dita H. Kinney, was officially appointed the first Superintendent of the Corps on 15 March 1901. Kinney served as superintendent until she resigned on 31 July 1909.
The number of nurses on active duty hovered around 100 in the years after the creation of the corps, with the two largest groups serving at the general hospital at the Presidio in San Francisco and at the First Reserve Hospital in Manila.
World War I
In World War I, the military recruited 20,000 registered nurses for military and navy duty in 58 military hospitals. They helped staff 47 ambulance companies that operated on the Western Front. More than 10,000 served overseas, while 5,400 nurses enrolled in the Army's new School of Nursing. Key decisions were made by Jane Delano, director of the Red Cross Nursing Service, Mary Adelaide Nutting, president of the American Federation of Nurses, and Annie Goodrich, dean of the Army School of Nursing.Interwar period
Demobilization reduced the two corps to skeleton units designed to be expanded should a new war take place. Eligibility at this time included being female, white, unmarried, a volunteer, and a graduate from a civilian nursing school.In 1920, the Army Reorganization Act granted Army nurses relative rank, with their relative standing in the army corresponding to the standing of commissioned officers, although the nurses themselves were not commissioned officers. The “assimilated ranks” of major, lieutenant, and captain were authorized. Staff nurses were appointed as second lieutenants, the superintendent was appointed as a major, the assistant superintendent and directors were captains, and chief nurses were first lieutenants. The nurses were also authorized to wear insignia by the Act.
Flikke remained in the Army after the war. After 12 years at Walter Reed Army Hospital in Washington, D.C., she was promoted to captain and became the Assistant Superintendent of Nurses. She succeeded in creating new billets for occupational therapists and dieticians. Flikke became Superintendent, with the rank of Major, in 1938.
World War II
At the start of the war in December 1941, there were fewer than 1,000 nurses in the Army Nurse Corps and 700 in the Navy Nurse Corps. All were women.Colonel Flikke's small headquarters in 1942, though it contained only 4 officers and 25 civilians, supervised the vast wartime expansion of nurses, in cooperation with the Red Cross. She only took unmarried women aged 22–30 who had their RN training from civilian schools. These nurses were commissioned for a term that lasted the duration of the war plus six months, but they were discharged if they married or became pregnant.
Due to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941, the United States entered the Pacific part of World War II. Along with this military effort was the work of the Flying Tigers in Kunming, China, under Claire Chennault. Nurses were thus needed in China to serve the U.S. Army. These nurses were recruited among the Chinese nurses residing in China, particularly the English-speaking nurses who fled Hong Kong to free China due to the Japanese invasion of Hong Kong on 8 December 1941. The Hong Kong nurses were trained by the Department of Medical Services of the Government of Hong Kong. They took up Nursing positions at the Flying Tigers, U.S. Army, Chinese Red Cross and China National Aviation Corporation. Cynthia Chan 陳靜渝 is the elder sister of Anna Chan 陳香梅.
Only a few African American nurses were admitted to the Army Nurse Corps. Mabel Keaton Staupers, who worked for the National Association of Colored Graduate Nurses with help from Eleanor Roosevelt, pressured the Army to admit African American nurses in 1941. The first black nurse admitted to the program was Della H. Raney who was commissioned as a second lieutenant in April 1941. The limit on black nurses was 48 in 1941 and they were mostly segregated from white nurses and soldiers. In 1943, the Army set a limit on black nurses to 160. That same year, the first African American medical unit, the 25th Station Hospital Unit, was deployed overseas to Liberia. Later, nurses were deployed to Burma, where they treated black soldiers. African American nurses also served in China, Australia, New Guinea, the Philippines, England and the US where they treated prisoners of war. By the end of the war, there were 476 serving in the corps.
On 26 February 1944 Congress passed a bill that granted Army and Navy Nurses actual military rank, approved for the duration of the war plus 6 months.
The Cadet Nurse Corps was created because of a nationwide shortage of nurses. With over 8 million soldiers, sailors, and airmen, the needs were more than double those of World War I. Hundreds of new military hospitals were constructed for the expected flow of casualties. Fearing a massive wave of combat casualties once Japan was invaded in late 1945, President Franklin D. Roosevelt called on Congress early in 1945 for permission to draft nurses. However, with the rapid collapse of Germany early in 1945, and the limitation of the war in the Pacific to a few islands, the draft was not needed and was never enacted.
File:StateLibQld 1 101360.jpg|thumb|left|Archbishop James Duhig meeting with United States Army nurses ca. 1944 at St Stephen's Cathedral.
By the end of the war, the Army and Army Air Forces had 54,000 nurses, and the Navy had 11,000—all women.
Some 217 black nurses served in all-black Army medical units. The AAF was virtually autonomous by 1942 and likewise was its Nurse Corps. Much larger numbers of enlisted men served as medics. These men were in effect practical nurses who handled routine care under the direction of nurse officers. Likewise many enlisted Wacs and Wafs served in military hospitals. Medical advances greatly increased survival rates for the wounded: 96% of the 670,000 wounded soldiers and sailors who made it to a field hospital staffed by nurses and doctors survived their injuries. Amputations were seldom necessary to combat gangrene. Penicillin and sulfa drugs proved highly successful in this regard. Nurses were deeply involved with post-operative recovery procedures, air evacuation, and new techniques in psychiatry and anesthesia.
Upon Flikke's retirement in 1943, she was succeeded by Florence A. Blanchfield, who successfully promoted new laws in 1947, that established the Army, Navy, and Air Force Nurse Corps on a permanent basis, giving the nurses regular commissions on exactly the same terms as male officers. A month before she retired in 1947, Blanchfield became the first woman to hold a regular Army commission.