We Have Winners!
I received the first e-mail asking me if I'd be interested in writing a companion book to the PBS series Mercy Street on July 3rd of last year. (And yes, I was ready to set off fireworks at the idea.) The eight months since then have been exciting, grueling, exciting, frustrating, exciting, humbling, and--oh yes--exciting. I put in long days,* spent time with old friends like Louisa May Alcott and Clara Barton, learned amazing/horrifying/inspiring things, and typed the word diarrhea more times than I would have thought possible. ** In the months between writing and the release of the book I discovered that promoting a book is even harder than writing one--at least if you are an introverted history buff.***
I've deeply appreciated the support and enthusiasm of the long-term Marginalia and I'm delighted to make the acquaintance of new readers. Y'all are the best.
Now it's time to give away some books.
Drumroll, please. Sandy, if you would pull names from the largest mixing bowl? (rustle, rustle)
And the winners are:
Mary Conway
Miriam Kahn
Carrie Ann Lahain
If you would send your mailing addresses to me at pdtoler@sbcglobal.net, I'll get those books in the mail.
Thanks for playing. Thanks for reading. Come Friday we'll be back to our regularly scheduled historical adventures.
*And may I take a moment to thank My Own True Love who read drafts, asked questions, listened while I talked through the rough spots, told me when I wasn't clear, suggested improvements, took over watering the plants in the front yard, and provided pizza and a beer when needed. I'm one lucky lady.
**I think this the first time I spelled it correctly on the first try.
***I'm still out and about talking/writing about the book but I'll try to keep commercial interruptions here on the Margins to a minimum. If you want to see where I'm speaking and when, I'm adding an events pages here on the blog and on my website. Today with any luck.
Confederate Nurses, Part 2
Union Secretary of State Stewart Cameron accepted Dorothea Dix's offer to organize an army of nurses without taking the time to define what her position would entail or how she would fit into a military medical bureaucracy, which was itself in a state of transformation. As a result, Dix was in constant conflict with the Medical Bureau and chief surgeons.*
Kate Cumming
The Confederate Congress did a better job of outlining the role of women in military hospitals. In response to the statistical evidence that patients fared better in hospitals run by women, the act which created general hospitals for the Confederate Army included clearly defined positions for women. Each hospital would have two matrons and two assistant matrons who would be in charge of the “domestic economy” of the hospital. Responsible for the housekeeping, cooking, and nursing staffs, these women were hospital administrators rather than what we think of as nurses today. (Kate Cumming, perhaps the best known of the Southern nurses, admitted that she was a nurse for more than two years before she ever changed a bandage or dressed a wound.) In addition, each ward would have two ward matrons, who were responsible for preparing beds for incoming soldiers, administering medicine, and supervising the nursing and cleaning staffs.
The duties outlined in the 1862 legislation included little of what many Union volunteers considered “real nursing.” In fact, the act did not deal with hospital personnel below the level of ward matron, ignoring the people who actually took care of the patients. At the beginning of the war, convalescent soldiers provided most of the actual nursing,** a practice that Cumming railed against on the grounds that nursing was a skill that had to be learned,*** and that since the soldiers were rotated through the job the same way they rotated through guard duty it was a skill they had no time to learn.
As the war continued, the South suffered a manpower crisis that made the continued use of convalescent soldiers as nurses increasingly difficult. The Confederacy desperately needed to fill noncombatant jobs with individuals ineligible for military service, of which women were the largest and most underutilized group. As early as June 1861, individual hospitals ran newspaper ads looking for nurses, but women did not volunteer for hospital work in the numbers needed in the face of mounting casualties.
Hospitals soon turned to a group of noncombatants who did not have the choice of saying no: slaves. Brigadier General John Bankhead Magruder argued for the employment of female slaves as nurses on functional grounds, claiming that they combined the qualities needed for the perfect nurse: female tenderness, no aversion to menial labor, and the habit of subservience. (And may I say, !!!!!) The largest number of women who performed front-line nursing and other hospital work in Confederate general hospitals were slaves, either impressed into service or hired out by their owners. So much for volunteer nurses.
*This situation was made worse by Dix's prickly personality and lack of administrative skills. Her detractors nicknamed her "Dragon Dix" for a reason.
**Before the Civil War, convalescent enlisted men who were not yet able to return to their military duties performed any nursing required by ill or wounded soldiers, a system that would continue side by side with female nurses in both American armies throughout the war.
***A radical idea at the time.
REMINDER: Assuming you are reading this prior to February 29, 2016, it's not to late to enter to win a copy of Heroines of Mercy Street here or here.
Confederate Nurses, Pt 1
Both the television show Mercy Street, and Heroines of Mercy Street* look at Civil War nurses through the lens of a single Union hospital, Mansion House Hospital in the occupied city of Alexandria, Virginia. I use the "memoirs" of two women who nursed there, Mary Phinney von Olnhausen and Anne Reading,** as a framework for the larger story of Civil War nurses. As result, Heroines of Mercy Street focuses on the experience of Union nurses. But it is important to remember that women in the South also volunteered as nurses
Confederate women's experience of nursing in the war differed in several significant ways from that of their Northern counterparts--ways which reflected not only differences in the structure of Northern and Southern society but differences in how they experienced the war.
A large number of the women who volunteered to nurse in the North were members of the educated and reform-minded middle class that had developed alongside the rise of industrialized cities. The South had for the most part escaped both the benefits and woes of industrialization. Instead of middle-class reformers, the region had its own breed of women with the habit of command: women who ran large plantation households that were effectively small, or not so small, businesses.
Window in memory of "Captain Sally Tompkins". Note the drawing of the hospital at the top of the window.
In the early months of the war, women with social clout and experience in running their family estates stepped forward to organize care at the local and state levels throughout the South. In Tennessee, Mary Rutledge Fogg, descendent of two signers of the Declaration of Independence, wrote to the Confederate president Jefferson Davis demanding help establishing hospitals in Nashville, Memphis, and Knoxville. She also informed him, almost as an aside, that she had recruited a corps of women through the Ladies Tennessee Hospital and Clothing Association to act as nurses, whom she was sending to Virginia the next day. In Virginia, Letitia Tyler Semple, granddaughter of former president John Tyler, descended on Williamsburg in the summer of 1861 with the intention of helping sick soldiers. Discovering that the “domestic arrangements” of the hospital were unacceptable, she took over the kitchen, pantry, and laundry. Later she also wrote to President Davis and requested that he appoint her female superintendent of not only the Williamsburg hospital where she was already filling that role, but two others as well. Juliet Opie Hopkins, who managed her father’s estate in western Virginia before her marriage to an Alabama judge, equipped and ran field hospitals near the front for the benefit of Alabama regiments, and took charge of both the provisioning and organization of the Alabama hospitals in Richmond. On a smaller scale, twenty-eight- year-old Virginia heiress Sallie Tompkins outfitted a Richmond house as a twenty-two-bed hospital where more than thirteen hundred men were cared for over the course of the war, with only seventy-three deaths—the lowest mortality rate of any military hospital in the war in either the South or North.
Miss Tompkins was not the only woman to run a successful hospital for Confederate soldiers. In 1862, the Confederate Senate appointed a committee to investigate complaints about military medical care. The committee reported an astonishing statistic regarding the impact of female nurses and female-run hospitals: investigators found that the mortality rate among soldiers nursed by men in male-run institutions averaged 10 percent, compared to a mortality rate of 5 percent among soldiers nursed in hospitals with a strong female presence.
So much for the assumption on the part of male surgeons, Union and Confederate alike, that female nurses would be useless in a military hospital.
* AKA My Book, My Book.
**In both cases pieced together by a relative from the letters and other documents they left behind.
REMINDER: Assuming you are reading this prior to February 29, 2016, it's not to late to enter to win a copy of Heroines of Mercy Street here or here.