Tending the Army Women and the British General Hospital in North America, 1754-1763

This essay argues that the British Army's North American general hospital and an increasingly large and diverse group of army women became not only connected but dependent on one another during the Seven Years' War. This relationship derived from the army's reorganization of its medical services in a way that intentionally predicated the hospital's operation and success on army women working for it, particularly as nurses. Both the medical staff and women attached to regular and provincial regiments realized benefits from this linkage; the hospital was able to cope with increasingly large numbers of patients, and women found that serving as nurses provided them with reliable access to regimental provisioning and security. Yet hospital personnel also increasingly had to regulate army women on behalf of the regiments, while women working for the hospital faced heightened dangers of illness, military attack, enemy capture, and death.