Anna Caroline Maxwell is called the American Florence Nightingale, and the comparison is earned in one specific way: she took trained nurses into a catastrophic army camp, the death rate collapsed, and the government created a permanent nurse corps as a result.
Training
Maxwell was born on March 14, 1851 in Bristol, New York. She began nursing at the New England Hospital for Women and Children in 1874 without formal training, spent two years in England, and then trained properly at the Boston City Hospital Training School under Linda Richards.
She ran training schools in Montreal and Boston, and in 1892 founded the school of nursing at Presbyterian Hospital in New York, which she led until 1921 and which became the Columbia University School of Nursing.
Chickamauga
The Spanish-American War of 1898 killed far more American soldiers with disease than with bullets. The training camps were the worst of it, and Camp Thomas at Chickamauga, Georgia was among the worst camps: typhoid, malaria and measles running through tens of thousands of men, with no trained nursing at all.
Maxwell was asked to take nurses in. She brought a contingent of trained women into a military system that did not want them, was not organized to receive them, and had no rank or status to give them.
The results were immediate and were counted. Under her direction her nurses managed more than 600 cases of typhoid and other fevers, and the mortality at the camp fell sharply.
That was the evidence. The Army had argued that trained female nurses were an unnecessary luxury; Chickamauga made the opposite case in numbers that could not be dismissed, and it is the direct reason Congress established the Army Nurse Corps as a permanent body in 1901.
Rank
Maxwell spent the next two decades on the unfinished part of it. Army nurses had a corps but no rank, which left them without authority, protection or pension — the problem Julia Stimson was working on from inside the service.
Maxwell campaigned from outside, and relative rank was granted in 1920.
In the First World War she organized and equipped Base Hospital No. 2, a Presbyterian Hospital unit, for service in France. France awarded her its Medal of Honor for Public Health. Columbia gave her an honorary master's degree, unusual for a nurse at the time.
Maxwell died on January 2, 1929, at 77, and was one of the first women buried at Arlington National Cemetery.
Related
Sources
- Anna Caroline Maxwell, for the chronology, Chickamauga and the campaign for rank. Accessed September 9, 2026.
- Our history. Columbia University School of Nursing. Accessed September 9, 2026.
- Army Nurse Corps history. Army Medical Department Office of Medical History. Accessed September 9, 2026.