A Question about dangers to Nurses

Seriously, thanks for getting into this topic. History tends to do this ' thing ' where one or a few names get to represent all of them you know? Everyone knows Clara Barton- and should. She was beyond remarkable. The thing is, the rest are not as well known 150 years later, it's a little crazy. I've been thinking more and more of of them these last weeks because they're all out there again, Bless all of them.

Like I said, I really didn’t even think about it until I was creating the character for my story. I didn’t realize until I was doing some cursory study that women actually were a bit more involved in healing even before Florence Nightingale made it more attractive by making it more popular. Like there was a whole sub-set of Bone Setters, women who became professional bone setters for broken bones going back into the 1700s.

But it really wasn’t until the other night that the impression for making her experience a little more spicy we should say. Only to realize that not only did I not actually know much about what actually happened to them, but then only to discover that there really isn’t a great deal of info to find on them.
 
isn’t a great deal of info to find on them.


Odd, isn't it? A woman currently serving in the forces has an excellent blog on women in uniform and there are some very good books- nothing nicely comprehensive, you know? I'd like to find the time to glue together what we have here on CWT- must be dozens of threads, it'd be a start.

What's so odd is, in posting threads there's also not an amazing of interest. That isn't said in a snarky spirit, it's just not a topic arousing general interest which is weird. Just last night I glued together another war-bio of a nurse whose record looks like a regimental flag.
 
What's so odd is, in posting threads there's also not an amazing of interest.
It can be a tough nut to crack. I've seen some of the most developed, well researched posts sink like stones. And that says nothing about their authors. In fact, perhaps the detail contained in them may even leave some people either 'breathless' or satisfied. They're either taking it all in, or there isn't anything more they could possibly say. But, have no doubt. If they've read it, they've learned something.

Even if it is that we have experts here who can talk on almost any subject and not leave any questions behind.

Although a comment would be nice :smile:
 
Odd, isn't it? A woman currently serving in the forces has an excellent blog on women in uniform and there are some very good books- nothing nicely comprehensive, you know? I'd like to find the time to glue together what we have here on CWT- must be dozens of threads, it'd be a start.

What's so odd is, in posting threads there's also not an amazing of interest. That isn't said in a snarky spirit, it's just not a topic arousing general interest which is weird. Just last night I glued together another war-bio of a nurse whose record looks like a regimental flag.

That's something you should do. I'm sure that if you turned it into a book, with a few people contributing, you could get a tidy little profit off of it.

I have to assume that the interest is indeed there, especially with the explosion in revisionist and social studies in the historical genre. One of my favorite books I've read was Autumn of the Black Serpent which shed light on George Washington and his illegal land speculation in the 1768 Proclamation exclusion zone in the Western Side of the Appalachians, which actually resulted in '74 Virginian veterans of the French and Indian War to begin compiling files for a lawsuit against him.
 
I'm the last person on the planet to admit defeat before starting, just lack the necessary writing skills required to launch an entire book. Oh, I can blah blah blah until the cows come home, eat dinner, watch the news and put the kids to bed. What's required of an author is a few years worth of serious polish. I'm all smudge and disorganized files.

OK, now I'm distracted by George's land speculation. Just what I need, another book for The List!
 
View attachment 353506



These women were serving both near and on the fields of battle. Surely some were captured with the wounded they were tending to when their army retreats, accidentally shot by wayward minies and cannon shells or else contracted illnesses due to their proximity to death and disease.

Harriet Patience Dame was captured twice, and released both times. Maybe release was the usual procedure.
 
I just bought a couple of used books from Abebooks and this book popped up as "you might want this." This is more expensive than I wanted to buy today but I thought this was very interesting and may get it later. I thought one of you guys might be interested in this book too.

Women at the Front: Hospital Workers in Civil War America

Schultz, Jane E.


4.06 avg rating •
17 ratings by Goodreads

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ISBN 10: 0807858196 ISBN 13: 9780807858196

Publisher: University of North Carolina Press, 2007

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As many as 20,000 women worked in Union and Confederate hospitals during America's bloodiest war. Black and white, and from various social classes, these women served as nurses, administrators, matrons, seamstresses, cooks, laundresses, and custodial workers. Jane E. Schultz provides the first full history of these female relief workers, showing how the domestic and military arenas merged in Civil War America, blurring the line between homefront and battlefront.
 
OK, now I'm distracted by George's land speculation. Just what I need, another book for The List!

Yeah.....Honest George wasn't as honest as we have been told.

Part of the problem with the land speculation was that each Virginian veteran was allotted a certain amount of land acrage for their own depending on their rank west of the Apaalacians (for some reason my phone won't let me autocorrect to their correct spelling). But after Pontiac's Rebellion, the English Crown blocked the west from settler expansion. So George had agents secretly go in there and basically lay out all the good lands, much of it along the river fronts, which was the best lands. So when this area opened up, he rushed in and bought up all the good lands, which was illegal as every veteran was meant to have equal opportunity. The only reason he escaped justice was the Revolution and he became a hero.

Who in their right minds was willing to put the hero of the Revolution on trial?

It's also been speculated that his main reason for joining the Revolution was to free up all the land to the west from the control of the Crown for landowners like himself.

When he was President and was serving his term in Philadelphia, he brought his slaves with him. However, according to the Pennsylvania law at the time, any slave who was in the state for IIRC for 6 months, they would become automatically free. So he would alternate slaves out a week before they could be freed. One of his slaves ended up running away and becoming free by default.

The last wasn't part of the book, but a video I watched a few months back on his slaves.
 
Harriet Patience Dame was captured twice, and released both times. Maybe release was the usual procedure.

If I recall, she was captured at Second Manassas but was released only because of how she tended to both sides without discrimination.

The second time was because Jackson ordered it.

I just bought a couple of used books from Abebooks and this book popped up as "you might want this." This is more expensive than I wanted to buy today but I thought this was very interesting and may get it later. I thought one of you guys might be interested in this book too.

Women at the Front: Hospital Workers in Civil War America

Schultz, Jane E.


4.06 avg rating •
17 ratings by Goodreads

View attachment 354094

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0807858196 ISBN 13: 9780807858196

Publisher: University of North Carolina Press, 2007

View all copies of this ISBN edition:
12 New
from US$ 25.94


3 Used
from US$ 32.35


View all formats and editions of this title:

Softcover (13)
from US$ 25.94


Hardcover (14)
from US$ 20.00


View all collectible editions of this title:

First Edition (7)
View Offers


Signed Copy (1)
View Offers



As many as 20,000 women worked in Union and Confederate hospitals during America's bloodiest war. Black and white, and from various social classes, these women served as nurses, administrators, matrons, seamstresses, cooks, laundresses, and custodial workers. Jane E. Schultz provides the first full history of these female relief workers, showing how the domestic and military arenas merged in Civil War America, blurring the line between homefront and battlefront.

That'll probably be a purchase once I actually get to that part of her story. Which honestly is potentially three books out, as this first book is set between 1845-1858. With the next three books being in 1860, 1861 and 1862 respectively.
 
It should be noted that it wasn't only nurses that cared for the wounded. Laundresses often stepped up to the challenge. And those laundresses were sometimes closer to combat than they may have liked. At Shiloh a laundress with the 1st MN Lt Arty had a cannonball go between her legs. When the 4th MN VI went on furlough the laundresses went forward to assist with the wounded in the front half of the train. A steward and two laundresses were wounded/killed when guerrillas fired into the hospital train.
 
It should be noted that it wasn't only nurses that cared for the wounded. Laundresses often stepped up to the challenge. And those laundresses were sometimes closer to combat than they may have liked. At Shiloh a laundress with the 1st MN Lt Arty had a cannonball go between her legs. When the 4th MN VI went on furlough the laundresses went forward to assist with the wounded in the front half of the train. A steward and two laundresses were wounded/killed when guerrillas fired into the hospital train.


Yes, that goes back to being able to define ' Civil War Nurse ', right? It's pretty broad. Of course a woman who may have been paid as a laundress originally spent more time in hospitals or as a front line nurse. At Bull Run, regiments had men assigned as ' nurse ', I can't find where if or where that ended. Any housewife on or near any battlefield became a nurse- with wounded packed into her home, how could she not? Her children, too- wish I could remember which adult remembered as a small child remembered their mother saying scolding them, saying ' Yes, it's awful, but if you don't hold that bandage this man will bleed to death '.

I realize Army nurses received training, a lot of others who really would qualify had none- showing up counted. Just read another account by one of Carrie Shead's students. She spent 3 months under the supervision of the Sisters at one of the hospitals, nursing wounded.

Then there's Sanitary Commission ' Agents ', Christian Commission workers, anyone from the gazillion church and state ladies organizations- women and men who just, plain showed up at battlefields. I think it was Sophronia Buckland who wrote of a mother who came to Gettysburg to find her son had already died. She pitched a tent and stayed until Camp Letterman sent their last wounded away, she said if she couldn't have her son, she could help do what she could to send someone else's son home.

There's room for an awful lot of research here, it'd be an amazing book.
 
If you read Ms. Alcotts diary, you will see some of the normal duties of a nurse in a hospital. I love the fact that they sang! But yeah, not much info on the number of nurses who died in the war. You know, cause we were just women..
I have just finished reading "Chimborazo" the Confederacy's Largest hospital by Carol C. Green. My GGF, William T. Rodgers was a patient several times at Chimborazo. He was captured at Gettysburg after being wounded in his right arm. The book does a good job of describing the Doctors and Nurses, volunteers, who took care of the wounded. It has a lot of information regarding medical treatments.
 
I have just finished reading "Chimborazo" the Confederacy's Largest hospital by Carol C. Green. My GGF, William T. Rodgers was a patient several times at Chimborazo. He was captured at Gettysburg after being wounded in his right arm. The book does a good job of describing the Doctors and Nurses, volunteers, who took care of the wounded. It has a lot of information regarding medical treatments.

I remember reading an old America's Civil War article about a North Carolina spa near a natural springvthat ended up being turned into a long term convalescent hospital that at it's height had a thousand patients. I have to sometime go do some a Googling and see if perhaps I could find what it was called or even if i recall correctly.
 
I remember reading an old America's Civil War article about a North Carolina spa near a natural springvthat ended up being turned into a long term convalescent hospital that at it's height had a thousand patients. I have to sometime go do some a Googling and see if perhaps I could find what it was called or even if i recall correctly.


Sorry to just catch up with this @Harms88 - that spa was on my LIST ( which is getting longer, we're busier than ever with the lockdown ) . You may not find anything via Google search? Those spas were amazing, generally wonderful, sprawling hotels slash veritable mansions where people flocked for vacations. Try era newspapers entering but don't use ' spa ', use ' resort ' or ' hotel ' or ' mineral springs '. You'd also have luck browsing those lengthy pamphlets railroads produced- they put together excursions inclusive of those places.

I ' think ' I might know which one it was and never knew they'd turned it into a hospital- poked around in those places not long ago.
 
Sorry to just catch up with this @Harms88 - that spa was on my LIST ( which is getting longer, we're busier than ever with the lockdown ) . You may not find anything via Google search? Those spas were amazing, generally wonderful, sprawling hotels slash veritable mansions where people flocked for vacations. Try era newspapers entering but don't use ' spa ', use ' resort ' or ' hotel ' or ' mineral springs '. You'd also have luck browsing those lengthy pamphlets railroads produced- they put together excursions inclusive of those places.

I ' think ' I might know which one it was and never knew they'd turned it into a hospital- poked around in those places not long ago.


I actually totally forgot about it until I jumped on the site and saw that you had quoted the post. lol

I did however find what I was talking about. The article appeared in the March 1995 issue of America's Civil War and it was actually the Kittrell's Springs Hotel which was a popular summer resort that had opened in 1858. It was close to Raleigh and used after 1864 as a hospital only because of mounting pressure from the Confederate government.

Resort of the Dead: Mark J. Crawford
 
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