She’s the second nurse in from the right, a petite young woman who, by the next year became Head Operating Room Nurse at Brooklyn Hospital. Notice that the nurses wore a square of gauze cloth, folded and tied on their heads instead of caps. She hated that, and designed a nurses’ cap that was adopted by the hospital a year or two later.
In this photo, three surgeons are reconstructing the patient’s right hand. The anesthesiologist is seen at the head of the patient, manipulating the ether cone. I was amused to see that the doctors are using the patient as a table for their instruments, as I know has been done with me a time or two.
My grandmother was 25, and had come from Bermuda alone to train as a nurse. She later married a doctor she met at the hospital. She was a British subject, but acquired American citizenship as well as a result of her marriage. Read her story in my new book, The Girl Who Talked Too Much.
Quite a capable woman, and yet neither she nor any other woman in this country had the right to vote in elections until 1920, when the 19th amendment was passed.
Ann Dickinson Sargent 