TBT: Super Awesome People™ in History.
On April 1, 1884 Florence Aby Blanchfield was born in Shepherdstown, West Virginia, as the fourth of eight children. In 1906, she graduated from Pittsburg’s Southside Hospital Training School for nurses. Much of Blanchfield’s family worked in healthcare, including her mother and two sisters (nurses), and her maternal grandfather and an uncle (both physicians). Blanchfield continued her education in operating room supervision and technique at Dr. Howard Kelly’s Sanitarium and Johns Hopkins University.
In her early career, Blanchfield worked as operating room supervisor at Southside Hospital and Montefiore Hospital (Pittsburgh, PA), and as an industrial nurse for the United States Steel Corporation (Bessemer, PA), attended the Martin Business college, and became superintendent of a training school at Suburban General Hospital (Bellevue, PA). She also worked for six months in 1913 as an operating room nurse and anesthetist at Ancon Hospital (now Gorgas Hospital) in the Panama Canal Zone, which was an unincorporated territory of the United States at the time.
Colonel Florence A. Blanchfield and Army Nurse Corps Members 
Blanchfield and General Dwight D. Eisenhower
Blanchfield joined the Army Nurse Corps (ANC) in 1917 and served in France through the remainder of World War I, as acting chief nurse from August 1917 to January 1919 in Angers and in Camp Coetquidan, France. After briefly leaving the military, she returned to the Army Nurse Corps in 1920 and served at army hospitals in San Francisco, Michigan, Indiana, Washington D.C., Georgia, Missouri, and internationally in the Philippines and China.
In 1935, Blanchfield became a staff officer for the U.S. surgeon general. She then became assistant superintendent (1939), acting superintendent (1942), and finally superintendent (1943) of the Army Nurse Corps, a position she held until her retirement in 1947. Blanchfield was nicknamed the “Little Colonel” (she was 5’1″ tall), and under her leadership, the ANC was expanded from approximately 1,000 to 57,000 Army nurses during World War II. Blanchfield toured battlefields extensively during the war, which led to her decision to move nurses closer to the frontline in order to render aid more quickly to injured American servicemen (although their proximity to battle put many nurses at risk).
Despite attaining the ranks of first lieutenant (in 1920), captain (1939), and then lieutenant colonel (1942), Blanchfield’s achievements were not recognized fully, as nurses were denied the rights, privileges, and pay that male officers received. In 1947, the Army-Navy Nurse Act remedied this inequality by placing the Army Nurse Corps in the regular army with equal pay and privileges for the officers as their male counterparts.
On July 9, 1947, Florence Blanchfield became the first woman in U.S. history to hold a permanent military rank when she was commissioned as a lieutenant colonel in the regular army by General Dwight D. Eisenhower. Blanchfield retired that same year, and during her retirement, she remained active as a consultant and author, and she influenced the development of training programs for Army nurses. Blanchfield died in 1971 at age 87.
Awards and Recognition
- Distinguished Service Medal (1945, for her actions during World War II)
- Florence Nightingale Medal (1951, awarded by the International Red Cross)
- West Virginia’s Distinguished Service Medal (1963)
- American Nurses Association Hall of Fame Inductee (1996)
- The hospital at Fort Campbell, Kentucky was given the name Colonel Florence A. Blanchfield Army Community Hospital in 1982, which was the first time a U.S. Medical Department Activity (MEDDAC) was named for an Army nurse.
Read More About Florence A. Blanchfield
- Colonel Florence A. Blanchfield, 7th Chief, Army Nurse Corps (Army Nurse Corps Association)
- Col. Florence Blanchfield, RN (1884-1971), The Little Colonel (WorkingNurse.com)
- Florence A. Blanchfield (The Hall of Valor Project)
- Florence Aby Blanchfield (1882-1971) 1996 Inductee (American Nurses Association)
- Col. Florence Blanchfield, 87; Ex-Head of Nurse Corps, Dies (New York Times Archive)