Sister Mary Joseph Croke. Another voice from the Crimean War, 1854-1856.

Sister Mary Joseph Croke nursed with the Irish Sisters of Mercy during the Crimean War (1854—1856). Analysis of 161 pages of her journal entries from October 1854 to May 1856 reveals that Croke and her sisters worked as a systematic group that provided nursing care day and night. A contract with the war office gave them the necessary confidence in their "professional" rights. This helped them to endure the bias against their race and religion to gain access to men in need of their nursing expertise. They remained a cohesive group throughout their time in the Crimea and confronted the "self-assured self-righteousness of Victorian imperialism." Sister Mary Joseph Croke (nee Isabella Croke) was part of a long tradition of Irish nursing that Lavinia L. Dock traces "almost to prehistorical times." In the nineteenth century the Sisters of Mercy "early attained brilliant prestige in nursing." Dock describes the founder, Catherine McAuley (1778-1841), as a "beautiful, benign, and highly cultured woman of great gifts for leadership." McAuley turned her back on a decorous Dublin life and used her inheritance (about $1,400,000 in 1990 currency) to care for the poor. On 24 September 1827, she established the House of Mercy. Four years later on 12 December 1831, this charity was institutionalized as the Sisters of Mercy. Sister Mary Joseph Croke was born in Mallow, County Cork, in 1825, the second daughter and fourth of eight children born to William Croke and Isabella Plummer Croke. Croke's maternal grandparents, Fitzgerald