Hannah Ropes

Hannah Anderson Ropes (1809 to 1863) was an American nurse, abolitionist and writer born in New Gloucester, Massachusetts, in what became Maine. A convert to Swedenborgianism, she went to Lawrence, Kansas, in 1855 during the Bleeding Kansas conflict, nursed sick homesteaders there, and turned her letters into the book Six Months in Kansas: By a Lady, followed by a novel, Cranston House. Inspired by Florence Nightingale's Notes on Nursing and by her son's service in the Union Army, she volunteered in 1862 and was made matron, the supervisor of nurses, of the Union Hotel Hospital in Georgetown. She pressed for better conditions, going over the hospital's chief surgeon to the Secretary of War about a steward who was stealing supplies meant for wounded soldiers. Louisa May Alcott served under her there and praised her in Hospital Sketches. Ropes died of typhoid fever on January 20, 1863; her diary and letters were published in 1980.