Nurses of the Confederacy

Expired Image Removed Kate Cumming of Georgia, a native of Scotland, left her home in Mobile, Alabama along with 40 other women and traveled to the Tennessee boarder to treat Confederate victims of the Battle of Shiloh. She continued as a nurse throughout the war, spending a year at a hospital in Chattanooga, Tennessee where she became a paid nurse in the Confederate Army Medical Department.

She moved to Georgia after Chattanooga fell and served in many field hospitals as Sherman's troops moved South. She was at Americus, Cherokee Springs, Dalton, Newnan, and Ringgold. At the end of the war in 1865, she was serving in Southwest Georgia.

Returning to Mobile after the war, she published an account of her nursing experiences A Journal of Hospital Life in the Confederate Army of Tennessee from the Battle of Shiloh to the End of the War. She moved to Birmingham, where she became a teacher. She never married.

http://www.gacivilwar.org/story/kate-cumming
Her book is very interesting. The original 1866 version is quite candid.
 
I am reading:
Women at the Front: Hospital Workers in Civil War America
by Jane E. Schultz

Really interesting book on nurses and other women connected to the medical services. Anyone read it?
 
I have not read it. What kind of duties does it describe them doing besides bandage changing, feeding, writing letters?
I am only a quarter of the way through it. So far it is focused on who the women were. While the women involved in medical care were often depicted as elite or middle class, many were working class, immigrants, or blacks. I will let you know more when I finish the book.
 
Wonderful finds! It's unusual to discover such documentation of CSA... anything!
 
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