Press Release to Georgia Southern University
Dr. Elaine S. Marshall, Professor and Bulloch Healthcare Foundation Endowed Chair of the School of Nursing at Georgia Southern University, will be honored by the Susan B. Anthony House in Rochester, New York on November 9, 2009. She will present a lecture on the nurse who cared for Anthony during her last days.
Following Election Day in 1872, Susan B. Anthony was arrested, tried, and found guilty of the crime of voting while being a woman. She devoted the rest of her life to securing the right to vote for women. In 1906, Anthony returned home to Rochester after delivering her last public words, “Failure is impossible.” She went to her room, ill with heart failure and pneumonia, and called for a nurse.
Intrigued by the mystery of the nurse who cared for Anthony in her last days and interested in the nature of nursing care at the dawn of the twentieth century, Dr. Elaine Marshall began her adventure of historical research and discovery. She uncovered the life of the “ordinary” nurse who cared for the “extra-ordinary” suffragist, Susan B. Anthony. The nurse was Margaret Shanks. She not only cared for Anthony and her sister Mary Anthony at the end of their lives, but also served in the Spanish-American war in Chickamauga, Georgia, and is now buried in historic Arlington cemetery. Dr. Marshall published the story of Margaret Shanks in a recent issue of the prestigious nursing journal, Advances in Nursing Science.
Dr. Marshall not only conducts clinical research in nursing, but has published several works of historical research on the history of nursing. She is past Vice President of the American Association for the History of Nursing and was honored by that organization as a recipient of the Lavinia Dock Award for Outstanding Scholarship on the History of Nursing.