Reflection of Paper

    While writing my paper, I was suppose to post regularly about the progress I was making and the reactions I had to my research. However I worked on my paper over a long period of time, in short intervals. Therefore it would have been impractical for me to post short, vague sentence. As a result, I am going to combine those reaction posts into my reflection post.
    When I started my paper, my thesis statement was rather lengthy and didn't have a clear path. The first thesis I had mentioned society, nurses, surgeons, the military, and homes. I soon narrowed my research to nurses in the Civil War and how they changed the view of society and the treatment in the medical arena. One of the first books that we read in class has a vast amount of information about the role that the nurses played during the Civil War and how the soldiers made the role of those nurses a necessity. One of the most prominent themes that showed up throughout my paper was the organization of the USSC. Before I took this course I had not heard of the USSC or the role it played throughout medical history. Some of the regulations and orders that we have today are from the foundation that was instituted by the USSC. Also one of the most interesting themes that is underlying in my paper is the theme of perspective. Throughout time one of the reasons that certain things wee discovered at certain times is because perspectives and norms change. For example, during the Civil War the issue of sanitation was at the forefront. Today sanitation seems like a norm and it is what patients expect, but during he Civil War sanitation was advancing and helped form a foundation that caused sanitation to be perfected and more lives were and are being saved because of those advances. The  themes that are mentioned above are not the only topics that my paper contains, but they are the topics that captured my attention and helped me understand the history of medicine to a greater extent.