Posts Tagged ‘Civil War nurses’
Dorothea Dix Volunteers
“Dragon” Dix was a shadowy and controversial figure in the opening scenes of the PBS series, Mercy Street. The historical Miss Dix was just as controversial. For those of you who don’t have the details of the American Civil War at your fingertips: the war began at 4:30 a.m. on April 12, 1861, when troops…
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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…
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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…
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