Remember the Nurses

In 2026, in recognition of the United States of America’s 250th anniversary, the Barbara Bates Center for the Study of the History of Nursing launched a groundbreaking exhibit called Nursing the Revolution. The exhibit brought together rare and newly unearthed historical evidence of the work of nurses during the American Revolutionary War. Its goal was to place the story of nursing and caregiving at the very center of America’s founding and to highlight the connections between the story of nursing in the 18th century and our healthcare system today.

This digital exhibit is an outgrowth of this project, but it carries a slightly different mission: to expand the visibility of nursing in archival records of early America. Named with deliberate reference to Abigail Adams’ famous call upon her husband, John Adams, to “Remember the Ladies, and be more generous and favourable to them than your ancestors…” Here, we ask visitors to this site to “Remember the Nurses,” whose work was so often made invisible and whose presence has more often than not been treated as a matter of women’s nature, rather than as an act of deliberate skill and labor.

The study of nursing and caregiving before the late 19th century is often hampered by the lack of archival sources on this subject. As Dr. Roberts has argued elsewhere, the dearth in historical materials about nursing is the result of centuries of marginalization, devaluation, and dismissal of caregiving labor, a form of work that has been overwhelmingly performed by women. We invite researchers, educators, and students to explore the materials we have gathered here and to remember the nurses.

We hope that by expanding the reach of these important early American documents we can inspire future scholars to ask new questions and come up with new and innovative ways of revealing the stories of nursing and caregiving in the past. We also hope that this work will inspire contemporary nurses and caregivers themselves to consider their own contributions to history and to reflect on how they will be remembered.

These collections give a sense of the wide variety of textual and material sources that can be brought together to shed light on nursing and healthcare in the colonial and Revolutionary War periods.

Please enjoy exploring this site. If you have any questions, additional source suggestions, or would like to learn more, please reach out to the Barbara Bates Center for the Study of the History of Nursing at nhistory@nursing.upenn.edu.