From Nurse to Leader: Florence Blanchfield’s Remarkable Wartime Journey
She was born on the 1st of April 1884 in Shepherdstown in West Virginia. Her mother was a nurse and she had relatives who were physicians. After completing her nursing training in 1906, she moved into hospital roles, as a surgical nurse. She later worked in places as far away as the Panama Canal area.
When the First World War started, she joined the Army Nurse Corps and served in France from 1917 to 1919. Although she briefly returned to civilian work after the war, she was compelled back in to military service.
By the late 1930s, she was working in Washington and was rising slowly through leadership roles. During the Second World War, she became a superintendent of the Army Nurse Corps. She oversaw its growth from just a few hundred nurses to tens of thousands. She was awarded the Distinguished Service Medal in 1945 and played a key role in securing full military status for nurses in 1947. She also became the first woman commissioned into the regular U.S. Army. In 1951 she was awarded the Florence Nightingale Medal recognising her work in nursing.
Florence died on the 12th of May 1971 at the age of 87.
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