Mary J. Stafford
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Mary Jane Stafford-Blake (December 31, 1834 – December 8, 1891) was a school teacher, a prominent nurse during the American Civil War, and a postbellum doctor, medical educator, feminist, and author.
Mary J. Stafford was born in Hyde Park, Vermont, but moved with her family to Crete, Illinois, when she was only three years old. She was educated in the common schools. As a young woman, she taught school in Joliet, Shawneetown, and Cairo.
When the Civil War erupted, Stafford was teaching in the Cairo schools. The riverport became an important supply base and training center for the Union Army. Sanitary conditions, a poor understanding of the nature of germs and epidemics, and humid conditions at the camps near the confluence of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers combined to fell hundreds of soldiers with a variety of diseases. Stafford volunteered to help nurse these stricken men. Not long afterwards, she accompanied the army to Tennessee and worked closely with Mary Ann Bickerdyke treating the sick and injured near Fort Donelson.
In 1862, she accompanied the army of Ulysses S. Grant during the Battle of Shiloh, where she comforted and ministered to the wounded. Later, she served aboard a pair of military hospital ships on the Mississippi, the City of Memphis and the Hazel Dell.
When the war ended in 1865, Stafford studied medicine, graduating from the Medical College for Women in New York City four years later. She also studied at the University of Breslaw in Germany, where she performed the first ovariotomy ever done by a woman.
In 1872, Dr. Stafford opened a private practice in Chicago. She developed a plan for mass housing centered around a common service area for cooperative housekeeping to reduce drudgery for women. Later, she became Professor of Women's Diseases at the Boston University School of Medicine and a staff doctor at the Massachusetts Homeopathic Hospital. After her marriage, she adopted the name Mary Jane Stafford-Blake.
Among her publications was Health and Strength Papers for Girls.
Mary Jane Stafford died in Tarpon Springs, Florida.
[edit] References
The correct name of the individual in this biography is Mary Jane SAFFORD, not STAFFORD
[edit] Further reading
- Fischer, Leroy H., "Cairo's Civil War Angel, Mary Jane Stafford." Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society, No. 54, 1961.
