Louisa Mc Laughlin - Wartime Nursing

Wartime Nursing

On August 16, 1870, less than a month after the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War, Louisa and Emma went to France at the behest of the National Society for Aid to the Sick and Wounded in War (precursor to the British Red Cross) formed only 12 days previously. A week later they were nursing about 100 men desperately wounded in the Battle of Gravelotte.

They were then invited to join the Anglo-American Ambulance in Sedan by its surgeon-in-chief, Dr. J. Marion Sims. After passing through fields of burned corpses the nurses arrived just after the Battle of Sedan had left 5,000 dead and 20,000 wounded. The Ambulance, set up in a barracks, had beds for 384. Its eight British and eight American surgeons also attended to another 200 in tents.

After a month in Sedan, Emma and Louisa returned to England where they learned that the National Society would not support them if they set up an ambulance for which the Bishop of Orléans was pleading. They therefore made an independent appeal in The Times. This enabled them to return to France with 4,000 pounds of stores in November, just after the first Battle of Orléans.

They established their Ambulance Anglaise in a convent in a suburb of Orléans. Within weeks the second major battle broke out. The convent was at the center of the heaviest fighting. Despite the turmoil, compounded by shortages of food, drink and supplies, out of 1,400 patients the nurses lost only 40. This death-rate was far the lowest of any field station in the area because Emma and Louisa had insisted on "exquisite cleanliness" at a time when most surgeons did not wash their hands, and Florence Nightingale scoffed at the notion of germs.

When the Serbo-Turkish War began in August 1876 Emma and Louisa were living in Hampstead. They immediately set off as volunteers to work with the Red Cross Society of Servia. Armed with green-lined parasols and Hartin’s Crimson Salt disinfectant, they took care of wounded Servian soldiers who had been struggling against Turkish oppression.