Army Nurse Corps Case Study

Although there are more than 11,000 nurses serving in the Army Nurse Corps today, it has not always been this way (Larsen, 2015). For most of our country’s history, those numbered among military nurses were few. In fact, when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941, the United States Army had less than 1,000 nurses, of which a very limited number were women (Army Nurse Corps, n.d.). But it was not to stay this way. The traditional system quickly changed after that infamous December morning when Americans’ lives were overturned and the Second World War began. The enormous manpower needs faced by the United States during this time generated many new opportunities for American women, who eagerly stepped up to the task (Bellafaire, 2003). Not only did they become involved in the social and economic …show more content…
Those in Northern Africa were trained to aid in patient evacuations, while nurses in Southern Italy dealt with the dangerous climate that catered to malaria. Western European nurses cared for their own English and American soldiers, but they also learned to provide patient care to German prisoners of war, as well as concentration camp victims. Army nurses of the Pacific Theater worked near the front lines, following just one step behind U.S. troops as they jumped from island to island in the Mediterranean. Trained to avoid Japanese guerilla patrols and incidents of sexual harassment, these women were rarely allowed to leave their quarters without armed guards. Nurses stationed in China, Burma, and India experienced an extreme clash of cultures as they tried to maintain discipline among the wards. Many Chinese patients refused to remain isolated and thereby spread contagious diseases like malaria and typhus throughout the hospital. The women in this theater of war performed under very primitive conditions in a climate that was continuously undoing their work (Bellafaire,