Clara Barton: A Centenary Tribute to the World's Greatest Humanitarian / Founder of the American Red Cross Society, Author of the American Amendment to the International Red Cross Convention of Geneva, Founder of the National First Aid Association of America

by Charles Sumner Young

THE PASSING OF YEARS—RIGHT HABITS OF LIFE

At the age of 11 years Clara Barton was a nurse; at 15 years, a teacher; at 34 years, a clerk in the Patent Office; at 40 years, a nurse in the Civil War; at 59 years, an organizer of nurses in the Franco-Prussian war; at 60 years, President of the American Red Cross; at 78 years as President of the Red Cross in the Spanish-American war; at 83 years, retired from the Presidency of the Red Cross; at 84 years, organizer and the President of the National First Aid Association, which Presidency she held up to the time of her death in 1912, when she was 91 years of age.

Commenting on the passing of years, Clara Barton philosophizes: “Age is no business of ours. We have no control over its beginning and, unless criminally, none over its ending. I have never, since a child, kept a ‘birthday’ nor thought of it only as a reminder by others.

“I have been able to see that persistent marking of dates, and adding one mile-stone every year, encourages the feeling of helplessness, and release from activities which might still be a pleasure to the possessor. Somehow it has come to me to consider strength and activity, aided so far as possible by right habits of life, as forming a more correct line of limitation than the mere ‘passing of years.’”