1821–1912 · Civil War nurse & founder of the American Red Cross
Clara Barton was a Massachusetts schoolteacher and patent clerk who, with no medical training and no official standing, talked her way to the front lines of the Civil War to carry supplies and nurse the wounded — earning the name Angel of the Battlefield. She later led the search for the missing dead at Andersonville, ran relief in the Franco-Prussian War, and in 1881 founded the American Red Cross, which she led until 1904. She wrote constantly — diaries, thousands of letters, and several books of her own — which is exactly why a sentence that appears in none of them deserves scrutiny.