Abigail Hopper Gibbons practised at a period when medicine itself was being rebuilt on new foundations.
The record lists Abigail Hopper Gibbons as American abolitionist, reformer, activist and Civil War nurse (1801-1893).
Abigail Hopper Gibbons was born at Philadelphia in 1801. Her recorded nationality is United States.
Anaesthesia, antisepsis and germ theory arrived within fifty years and made modern surgery possible for the first time.
Clinical knowledge is accumulated slowly and revised often, usually at some cost.
That the work was done from United States matters: hospitals, training and research funding are unevenly distributed, and they decide which questions can be asked.
Abigail Hopper Gibbons died in 1893, aged 92. What survives is the change in practice, which is how a medical life is actually measured.
