Posts Tagged ‘Civil War’
Word With a Past: Shoddy
In the early nineteenth century British textile manufacturers began to recycle woolen rags into a an inexpensive woolen cloth. The rags were shredded into fibers, mixed with new wood, and then spun and woven into the cloth, which was known as “shoddy”–a term that may have come from an old word meaning divide.* The process…
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Cornelia Hancock: Civil War Nurse, Reformer, Muse
As the official superintendent of the Union Army’s newly minted nursing corps, Dorothea Dix had a clear vision of what her nurses should look like. Only women between the ages of thirty or thirty-five and fifty would be accepted. “Neatness, order, sobriety and industry” were required; “matronly persons of experience, good conduct or superior education”…
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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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