Dix, and other leaders, envisioned a carefully selected corps of nurses patterned after Nightingale's Crimean mission. But the scope of the war soon overwhelmed them. Nightingale took thirty-eight women with her to a distant land. In the United States, the war was never far from home, and many women simply appeared at the front.
Following the war, Jane Stuart Woolsey wrote about the "system of women-nurses,"
There never was a system. Hospital nurses were of all sorts, and came from various sources of supply; volunteers paid and unpaid; soldiers' wives and sisters who had come to see their friends and remained without any clear commission or duties; women sent by State agencies and aid societies; women assigned by the General Superintendent of Nurses; sometimes, the wife or daughter of a medical officer drawing rations.
