Men in Military, Psychiatric, and Anesthesia Nursing: A Historical Continuity

A history obscured by titles

Men were not absent from nursing’s history. They worked in military and psychiatric hospitals, men’s wards, hospital schools of nursing for men, anesthesia departments, and nursing practice committees. However, records confined them to being known by other titles, including attendants, orderlies, hospital stewards, corpsmen, soldiers, anesthetists, and brothers. These labels mattered; they determined who was considered a nurse, allowed into professional nursing associations, and included in nursing histories.

Military hospitals and bedside work

One of the most impressive examples of this trend is military medicine, with the lines between nursing and transport, sanitation and medical care often blurred. Men carried water, changed bedding, moved the wounded, washed the soiled body, took the temperature, distributed food, helped to dress wounds, attended wounded men in their delirium, and sat with them while they died. For the U.S. Civil War, the majority of those contracted to provide nursing services for Union forces were males. Since many were soldiers, hospital stewards, or civilian helpers, the work was often remembered as military labor rather than nursing labor.

Civil War hospitals in Washington, DC, such as Armory Square Hospital, had wards filled with rows of wounded men. In these wards, care was provided that included material resources, discipline, observation, letter writing, wound care and feeding, and physical movement assistance. While some of this work was done by formally appointed nurses, much was done by men with official titles that fall outside the later professional story of nursing.

Walt Whitman in the Civil War hospitals

Walt Whitman, who would write numerous pieces about his life as a hospital volunteer, is the most well-known male volunteer for a Civil War hospital. In 1862, Whitman traveled to Virginia to find his wounded brother and began visiting DC hospitals. According to the Library of Congress, an unpaid delegate of the Christian Commission was authorized to minister to the sick and wounded and provide for their needs. On a practical level, this meant visiting sick soldiers, running errands, giving them small items, writing letters, and conversing with them.

Whitman himself describes the experience in “The Wound-Dresser.” In this poem, though, Whitman does not recount what he saw on a battlefield. He continues to describe himself in the hospital ward: “I onward go, I stop, / With hinged knees and steady hand to dress wounds.” The poem includes the ordinary: “An attendant follows holding a tray, he carries a refuse pail.” Whitman was not a nurse; nurses as a profession did not exist at this time. His Civil War writing, including a posthumously published book of letters (also called The Wound Dresser) “written from the hospitals in Washington, D.C.,” provides a detailed, repetitive, physical, intimate, and sustained image of male bedside care.

Male wards‚ psychiatric hospitals‚ and unequal training

By the late 19th century, Nightingale-style schools had also helped to mythologize the resident nurse as a respectable woman, and to link professional nursing to femininity. However, male attendants were still employed in some instances in hospitals and asylums for male patients, especially in supporting intimate bodily care, psychiatric surveillance, and sex-segregated wards.

This created a practical problem: compared with female patients who were attended by trained nurses, male patients were often attended by orderlies with little formal training, particularly in psychiatric hospitals. Male wards often fell short, being crowded and custodial, but the problem was not just staffing. Male patients needed workers who were trained to observe symptom changes, prevent injury, support hygienic care, assist with treatment and stabilize wards.

The Mills Training School for Men at Bellevue

The professionalization of male nursing led to the establishment of specialized schools. In 1886, this included programs in New York’s Blackwell’s/Welfare Island and in Massachusetts’ McLean Hospital. The Mills Training School for Men was founded at Bellevue Hospital in 1888. NYU’s Bellevue archives describes it as a school created “to train male nurses to work in men’s wards of hospitals.”

The 1915 history of Bellevue stated that D.O. Mills funded the school on Christmas Day 1887, and that all five male wards were placed in the care of male scholars. The report says, “men of character and ability engaged in this work.” The experiment grew until “gradually the entire male side of the hospital was under their care.” By 1911, the school had graduated 438 men who were entitled to practice nursing in New York State with a diploma. It was not an informal apprenticeship. It was a conventional training program at one of the United States’ largest, most important hospitals.

Other schools and male nursing educators

Mills was part of a broader movement, with St. Vincent Hospital School for Men in New York opening in 1888. Chicago’s first Alexian Brothers Hospital School of Nursing opened in 1898, and the first Pennsylvania Hospital School of Nursing for Men opened in 1914. Some of these earlier schools were affiliated with religious orders, and some were associated with psychiatric hospitals, tuberculosis hospitals, or with male medical and surgical wards. Their existence shows that male education was far from unusual, but rather responded to specific clinical and institutional needs.

Several of these schools’ alumni helped develop the nursing profession. Brother Maurice Wilson was director of the Alexian Brothers Hospital program. McLean graduate LeRoy Craig directed the Pennsylvania Hospital School of Nursing for Men. He and congresswoman Frances Payne Bolton helped men secure military commissions. In addition to clinical staff, there were administrators, educators, and advocates.

Edward Lyon‚ nurse anesthesia‚ and the Army Nurse Corps

The Army Nurse Corps was one institution representing this blend of dependency and invisibility. While men had previously been caregivers in military hospitals, there was no permanent corps for them. The Army Nurse Corps was founded in 1901, and would remain closed to men for more than five decades. During World War II, male registered nurses could be conscripted but could not commission into the Army Nurse Corps, a point of frustration given their valuable training.

That changed on October 6, 1955, when Edward Lyon, a nurse anesthetist from Kings Park, New York, was appointed a second lieutenant in the Army Nurse Corps Reserve, becoming the first man to be commissioned in the Army Nurse Corps. His specialty was also historically prominent: nurse anesthesia required vigilance, technical expertise, quick decision-making, and constant attention to physiologic change. In nurse anesthesia, male nurses had a defined role that any military officer could understand and evaluate.

Vietnam and later military nursing

Male nurses served in Vietnam from early in the war, including nurse anesthetists assigned to combat units such as the 173rd Airborne Brigade, the 101st Airborne Division, and the 1st Cavalry Division. According to the Army Nurse Corps Association, First Lieutenant Jerome Olmsted and First Lieutenant Kenneth Shoemaker, nurse anesthetists, were among the Army Nurse Corps officers who died in the Vietnam War. Olmsted and Shoemaker, along with two female ANC officers, Captain Eleanor Alexander and First Lieutenant Hedwig Orlowski, were killed when their C-47 transport plane crashed on November 30, 1967, after they volunteered to assist a surgical team at another field hospital.

Their deaths are also prominent for connecting combat zone nursing with clinical practice by men‚ anesthesia‚ casualty evacuation‚ and surgical support systems‚ a process which continued with later figures․ Next in line was William T․ Bester‚ a nurse anesthetist and officer in the United States Army Nurse Corps․ Bester served as Chief of the Army Nurse Corps from 2000 to 2004‚ showing how the Army Nurse Corps went from closed to men to a potential way to senior military nursing positions․

A more precise historical record

Rather than a sudden influx of men into military, psychiatric, and anesthesia nursing, the story of men in nursing is one of roles and institutions, schools and exclusion, and changing policy. Men have been documented as Civil War nurses, male-ward nurses, psychiatric attendants, Bellevue students, Alexian Brothers, nurse anesthetists, and Army Nurse Corps officers, but were not new phenomena. They appeared as components of existing systems.

(This is the second post of our ongoing series, Men in Nursing: Recovering a Hidden History of Care.)

Trae Stewart, PhD, MPH, MSN, MS, PMHNP-BC, is a psychiatric-mental health nurse practitioner and researcher. A former Fulbright Specialist, he is a visiting senior lecturer at King’s College London.