It was more like philanthropy. The army medical systems were very primitive, so some women started volunteering as nurses to help recovering soldiers.
You think there was any shortage of men to provide medical aid? My oh my, how did armies survive without female nurses over the last few thousand years?
if you were to get a wound severe enough to remove your ability to wash yourself or use the bathroom unassisted, would you rather:
a. have a man give you a spongebath
b. have a woman give you a spongebath
c. let the accumulating filth infect a wound
A man, definitely. He's going to need strength to move me around and do a good job of it. I'd always want a male firefighter to rescue me from a burning building. Is wound care something sexual to you? Why do you want a woman?
You think there was any shortage of men to provide medical aid?
There was a shortage of men willing to. The armies had surgeons, but not much in the way of long term care if you lost a limb or were otherwise put out of the fight.
My oh my, how did armies survive without female nurses over the last few thousand years?
As in how did the casualties survive? They didn't. A lot of them died of treatable wounds.
Don't compare apples to oranges. I don't know if you're explicitly meaning this, but I get the impression you're implying that, say, Ancient Romans died of wounds that could have been tended by modern medicine that didn't exist then. Do you think they'd have done any better with female nurses?
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