It's Sarah Bernhardt's Birthday!

10/23/1844 - 3/26/1923
More amazing than this incredible woman's genius on the stage, or her continuing to tread the boards after a leg was amputated, or her ability to faint dead away when bored (I wish I could do that!), was her humanitarian creation of a hospital.
During the Prussian War's Siege of Paris (1870-1871), inspired by the Comedie Francaise's turning the theater into a hospital for war casualties, Sarah Bernhardt turned the Theatre de l'Odeon into a hospital. Getting a permit, and his fur-lined overcoat, from the Prefect de Police (who may have been her first lover), the twenty-six-year-old actress was completely focused on tending the wounded herself, assisted by two volunteers and instructed by a Dr. Duchesne, whose services she commandeered. Sarah Bernhardt, "the creature of fragile health, worked with the vigor of ten peasants."* Her richer friends were cajoled into supporting the hospital, donating money and supplies. One example: the chocolate magnate M. Meunier, who donated five hundred pounds of his nourishing product.
The raids at night made it necessary for the staff to move their patients to the cellar, where flooding and rats prevailed. Forced to close the hospital, Bernhardt moved the more serious cases to the military hospital at Val-de-Grace. For the twenty remaining convalescents, she rented at her own expense an empty flat in the rue de Provence, where she and her two stalwart volunteers (including a Madame Lambquin, an older Odeon actress) nursed them to recovery. All told, more than one hundred fifty solldiers and two civilians were cared for at the Odeon hospital.
*Recommended reading: MADAME SARAH by Cornelia Otis Skinner, particularly Chapter 4, "Sarah's Field Hospital."