hanna260
Sergeant Major
- Joined
- Mar 1, 2015
- Location
- Just Around the Riverbend
So, I was inspired by @chellers (thanks, by the way!- hope you don't mind) who talked about her avatar in another thread, and how it represented her profession to look up the beautiful woman in cheller's avatar. Her name is Georgeanna Woolsey and she was pretty incredible. All nurses were- I don't know much about nursing as a profession or during the Civil War- so hoping some of you guys can help me out. She was a young, un-married woman in the beginning of the war, who was selected to become a volunteer nurse. She writes about the struggles they endured with the men of their own hospital.
No one knows who did not watch the thing from the beginning, how much opposition, how much ill-will, how much unfeeling want of thought, these women nurses endured. Hardly a surgeon whom I can think of received or treated them with even common courtesy. Government had decided that women should be employed, and the Army surgeons—unable, therefore to close the hospitals against them—determined to make their lives so unbearable that they should be forced in self-defense to leave.
Now, doesn't that just make your blood boil a bit- these brave woman who come to help the men on the front-lines, toil day in and out, see horrendous sights, and they're treated abominably by the people who should be on their side. She describes what it was like: nursing young men who were dying.
On the stacks of marble slabs…we spread mattresses, and put the sickest men. As the number increased, camp beds were set up between the glass cases in the outer room and we alternated—typhoid fever, cogwheels and patent churns, typhoid fever, balloons and mouse traps…Here for weeks, went on a sort of hospital pic-nic. We scrambled through with what we had to do…Here for weeks we worked among these men, cooking for them, feeding them, washing them, sliding them along on their tables, while we climbed up on something and made up their beds with brooms, putting the same powders down their throats with the same spoon, all up and down what seemed half a mile of uneven floor; coaxing back to life some of the most unpromising—watching the youngest and best die.
Georgeanna Woolsey : A Day in the Life of a Northern Nurse
http://www.civilwar.org/education/history/on-the-homefront/culture/nurse.html
No one knows who did not watch the thing from the beginning, how much opposition, how much ill-will, how much unfeeling want of thought, these women nurses endured. Hardly a surgeon whom I can think of received or treated them with even common courtesy. Government had decided that women should be employed, and the Army surgeons—unable, therefore to close the hospitals against them—determined to make their lives so unbearable that they should be forced in self-defense to leave.
Now, doesn't that just make your blood boil a bit- these brave woman who come to help the men on the front-lines, toil day in and out, see horrendous sights, and they're treated abominably by the people who should be on their side. She describes what it was like: nursing young men who were dying.
On the stacks of marble slabs…we spread mattresses, and put the sickest men. As the number increased, camp beds were set up between the glass cases in the outer room and we alternated—typhoid fever, cogwheels and patent churns, typhoid fever, balloons and mouse traps…Here for weeks, went on a sort of hospital pic-nic. We scrambled through with what we had to do…Here for weeks we worked among these men, cooking for them, feeding them, washing them, sliding them along on their tables, while we climbed up on something and made up their beds with brooms, putting the same powders down their throats with the same spoon, all up and down what seemed half a mile of uneven floor; coaxing back to life some of the most unpromising—watching the youngest and best die.
Georgeanna Woolsey : A Day in the Life of a Northern Nurse
http://www.civilwar.org/education/history/on-the-homefront/culture/nurse.html
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