Mary Rose Batterham: The Second Registered Nurse In The United States

Mary Rose Batterham spent her first decade as a nurse battling everything from typhoid epidemics to state legislators. She was a remarkable woman possessing a range of abilities which included assisting in surgeries performed on kitchen tables in Appalachian mountain cabins, writing and speaking persuasively to numerous organizations to promote nursing practice and education, displaying leadership qualities as an elected representative of her fellow nurses, and working with imagination and resourcefulness to help create the new profession of nursing (Bullough, Sentz & Stein, 1992; Kaufman, 1988). She was one of the founders of the North Carolina State Nurses Association (NCSNA), joining a group of women whom Batterham later characterized as: “…nurses, making history, constructionists, and iconoclasts, destroying the old conception of the graduate nurse and raising the trained woman to the dignity of a professional woman.”