A week after the attack on Fort Sumter, Dix, at age 59, volunteered to help the Union. Dix hoped to become the next Florence Nightingale. In June 1861, she was appointed the Union's Superintendent of Female Nurses during the Civil War. Dix served her entire position in the war without pay. She would only recruit plain looking women whom where married and older then thirty. She also organized a dress code consisting of plain black or brown skirts. The women were also not allowed to wear hoops and jewelry. Dorothea Dix was often known as "Dragon Dix" for being stern and brusque. Under Dix's leadership, nursing care greatly improved. And because of her efforts, more then two thousand women served as nurses.

When the war ended Dorothea Dix went back to her work helping the mentally ill. She later retired to the guest quarters of the state hospital she had founded thirty-five years ago. Dorothea Dix died in 1887 at the age of eighty-five. Even though just her memories remain, her work will forever last.

"In a world where there is so much to be done, I felt strongly impressed that there must be something for me to do." Dorothea Dix

Elizabeth Blackwell was the first woman to receive a medical degree in the United States. She was born near Bristol, England, but the Blackwell family moved to New York when a fire destroyed his businesses. Her Father died in 1838, and Elizabeth, her mother, and her sisters, opened a private school. Blackwell applied to medical schools throughout the northeastern U.S. Including Harvard, Yale, and Bowdoin Universities. Geneva College accepted her in 1848. Being the only girl, she was treated harshly during her first year of school. She graduated from Geneva in 1949, then she soon left to go to Paris, where she completed a midwifery course. During her time there she got ophthalmia, which is an eye infection that blinded her in her left-eye.

Blackwell went back to New York in 1851, but was unable to practice medicine for years because no one would hire her. Two years later, she purchased an old house in New York and opened an office in 1853. In time, this became the New York Infirmary for women and children.

In 1858, Blackwell returned to England to lecture and practice medicine. A year later, Blackwell became the first woman to have her name put on the Medical Register of the United Kingdom. Then, the following year, Blackwell returned to her home in New York. And shortly after, the Civil War was started. This incident held off her plans to open a women's medical college, but in 1868 the Woman's Medical College was opened.

Blackwell then moved back to England in 1869 leaving the college in the hands of her sister. In London, she worked as a physician until she became too old. She remained in England until she died the year of 1910.

Clara Barton

Clara Barton was born in Oxford, Massachusetts on December 25, 1821. Clarissa Harlowe Barton became a teacher at age 17 and later served as a copier in the United States Patent office in Washington D.C., before dedicating her life to voluntary service at the age of 40. During the Civil War she served as an independent volunteer on the Union side, helping with nursing and feeding, and by the end of the war her benevolence was legendary. Although not permitted to work with the International Red Cross because she was a woman she volunteered as an independent relief worker in Strasbourg, France during the Franco-Prussian war (1870-1871).

On May 21 1881, Barton was joined by Senator Omar Conger of Michigan and 22 others at her own modest residence to form the American Association of the Red Cross, which later became The American Red Cross. Barton lobbied tirelessly for the United States Ratification of the Geneva Convention, also known as the Treaty of Geneva, which was signed in March 1882.

Unlike the International Red Cross, which provided only battlefield relief, Barton’s society served America in war and in peace, and especially in times of disaster and national calamity, which Barton later stated was "the mainspring of all American worth for the Red Cross".

"The Angel of the Battlefield"

Clara Barton was not trained as a nurse but went on to found the American Red Cross in 1881. The Massachusetts native gained her first experience with the wounded when the casualties from the secessionist attack on the 6th Massachusetts were brought to the capital from Baltimore. Not connected with any of the nursing or relief agencies, she worked throughout the war as an independent, bringing medicines and supplies to the front lines. At Antietam her wagon followed the Union second corps onto the battlefield. A surgeon was killed while taking a drink from her and she even worked on one of the wounded, extracting a bullet from his cheek. Near the war’s close she was assigned by Lincoln, the duty of identifying missing soldiers. In this role she visited Andersonville and compiled a list of deceased prisoners. After returning to the U.S. from the Franco-Prussian war she founded the American branch and served as it’s president from 1882 to 1904. Under her leadership, the focus of the committee grew from warfare to include natural disasters.