Wartime Nurse recounts the amazing exploits of the nurses working in battle zones during the 100 years spanning wars from the Crimea to Korea - years when such nurses struggled for official recognition. During the Crimean War, Florence Nightingale's nurses defied male prejudice and the conventions of the age by caring for soldiers in hospitals seething with cholera and 'awash with sewage'. Reports from the South African wars of 1899-1902 told of nurses calmly dressing wounds in a street whilst shells exploded around them. In the First World War, over 10,000 nurses and 23,000 women of Voluntary Aid Detachments served not only in France but world-wide, from the ice-bound port of Archangel to the oven-like heat of Mesopotamia, nursing thousands of battle casualties in tented hospitals rife with dysentery and malaria. By the outbreak of the Second World War, the wartime nurse had earned full recognition after the Forces were, finally, forced to concede that there was a place for military nurses close to the battlefield itself. Exactly one hundred years after proving herself in the Crimea the wartime nurse was, at last, in action officially in Korea ready and willing to meet all demands.