New Modes of Warfare and the Gendering of Professional Military Medical Care in Continental and Colonial Wars, 1870s-1920s

This paper provides a unique perspective on “totalizing warfare” in the context of different modes of armed conflict in the second half of the ‘long’ nineteenth century.  It centers on the gendering of battlefield service by providing a socio-legal reading of the impact of states’ accession to the humanitarian norms of the Geneva Convention of 1864. Ratification brought a medical reform agenda into national life and simultaneously created a global network of relief organizations in the international Red Cross movement.  Blending global and local analyses, it explores the diverse national struggles that gained women entry into battlefield nursing and examines the complex motives sustaining the work of the gendered medical staff on the global battlefields. If, in the era, nursing became a female profession, there was nothing automatic about women’s battlefield service.  It grew out of the needs and experiences of armies in multiple wars, from those between imperial Great Powers to colonial conflicts to cooperative inter-imperial “expeditions” against armed insurrections. By gendering war, law, and medicine, the paper offers an historically-sensitive assessment of humanitarian practices tied to warfare and the ways they also helped structure, after 1918, an international public health commitment under the League of Nations centering on the public health nurse.