Clara Bartonthe BridgeENTJ

In December 1868, at 46, Clara Barton was in the middle of a speech when her voice gave out.

She had spent two years on the lecture circuit, more than two hundred talks across the Northeast and Midwest about what she had seen in the Civil War. Behind the talks sat a bigger job: the search for the men who never came home.

In March 1865, with President Lincoln's approval, she had opened an office to answer the families of missing soldiers. Letters came in by the thousand, each one a family waiting. By the time the office closed, it had answered 63,182 of them and identified 22,000 missing men. Many of the answers were the worst news a family can receive. They went out anyway.

It was the kind of work Bridges are built for: a huge, shapeless problem, turned into a system and run all the way to the end.

She had started life as a painfully shy farmer's daughter, born on Christmas Day 1821 in North Oxford, Massachusetts. At 30 she opened a free school in Bordentown, New Jersey, with six pupils. Within a year it had more than two hundred. When the town gave the school its own building in 1853, it hired a man to run it at twice her salary. She resigned and went to build something else.

Now the builder had stopped mid-sentence. “Nervous prostration had declared itself,” she said later. She did not recover quickly. Bridges can bear almost anything if there is something to do about it, and recovering from exhaustion is mostly waiting.

In the end her doctors decided for her.

Look at the verbs. She was ordered. She was able to go. Even leaving sounds like one more task she had finally managed to finish.

A later biographer saw the same shape across her whole life. Again and again, he wrote, she “carried an enterprise completely through to the triumphant close”, and when it was done, collapsed. Her body waited, almost politely, until the job was over, then sent the whole bill at once.

The rest turned out to be a door. In Switzerland she learned about the International Red Cross, a new movement for the relief of the wounded in war. When war came to France in 1870, the woman sent abroad to do nothing was soon working among civilians in Strasbourg, Paris and Belfort.

She brought the idea home. On 21 May 1881, at 59, she founded the American Red Cross, at an age when many people are winding down. The collapse at 46 had been the middle of her story.

She died on 12 April 1912, at 90. She had been sent away to stop, and she came back carrying the work of her next forty years.