In the history of medicine, Linda Richards is one of the names that keeps returning.
The record lists Linda Richards as American nurse.
Linda Richards was born at Potsdam in 1841. Her recorded nationality is United States. She trained at St. Johnsbury Academy.
Anaesthesia, antisepsis and germ theory arrived within fifty years and made modern surgery possible for the first time.
The test of medical work is whether practice changed, not whether the argument was elegant.
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.
Linda Richards died in 1930, aged 89. What survives is the change in practice, which is how a medical life is actually measured.
