Did Civil War nurses have uniforms?
A Brief Commercial: I will be speaking about Civil War nurses at the Lyceum in Alexandria, Virginia on Thursday, February 4. (Here's the link to the details--please note the snow date. I'm hoping Alexandria has had it's share of snow for the winter, but you never know.) If any of you live in the area, I'd love to see you there. If you have friends in the area who might be interested, please spread the word. For that matter, spread the word about the program the night before as well. Civil War medical historian Von Barron is speaking on the medical knowledge of the period. I'm looking forward to it.
And now, back to our regularly scheduled blog post and the question of nursing uniforms:
If you poke around the Internet looking for pictures of Civil War nurses for any length of time, you find pictures of youngish women in identical dresses with white caps and aprons identified as Civil War nurses. Every time I see them I want to pound my fist on my desk and say "No! No! No!"
The pictures are wrong in so many ways. For one thing, the dresses have the wrong silhouette for the period.* The dresses are frequently white. And in a few egregiously wrong cases, the women are wearing Red Cross armbands. (As a reminder, Clara Barton founded the American Red Cross in 1881--fifteen years after the end of the war.)
The fact of the matter is that, with the exception of the several hundred nuns who served, the women who volunteered as nurses did not wear uniforms. They definitely didn't wear spiffy white dresses.**
Instead they looked more like this:
Dorothea Dix had a strict dress code for her nurses. They were to wear brown, gray, or black dresses: practical choices given the inevitable exposure to blood, pus, vomit, and other filth in a hospital of that day and the heroic efforts required to do laundry in the nineteenth century.*** Bows, curls, jewelry, and especially hoop skirts and crinolines were forbidden. Again, a practical requirement. Hospitals were crowded and the aisles were too narrow for women in fashionably wide skirts to walk through them. In at least one case, a wounded soldier is reported to have bled to death when the crinoline worn by a female visitor caught on his cot and tore open his wound. ****
Nurses who served on the United States Sanitary Commission's hospital transit ships weren't bound by Dix's restrictions, but they soon recognized the practical value of her rules given the realities of life on the ships. Many of them arrived wearing the ribbons and ruffles typical of women of their class, but they soon abandoned frilly dresses in favor of a skirt and a man’s flannel shirt, worn with the collar open, the sleeves rolled up, and the shirttail out. They dubbed the shirts “Agnews,” after the doctor from whom they stole the first shirt.
Even the "Agnew "was a long way from the practicality of this:
Modern nursing field uniform, courtesy of US Army Medical Department, Office of Medical History
My guess is that Miss Dix would have approved.
*Leg o'mutton sleeves were popular in the 1830s and again in the 1890s, but not in the 1860s.
**And speaking of spiffy white dresses, I cannot believe that Emma Green in the first episode of Mercy Street got out of the hospital with that white wedding cake of a dress untainted except for a little blood on the skirt. Just like I don't believe Mary Phinney von Olnhausen could get through her first day the hospital with every hair still in place. (Of course, that may be because I can't get through a quiet day at my desk without my hair standing all anyhow.)
***Perhaps the subject of a future blog post. What say you, Margin-ites?
****This may be a nineteenth century urban legend: I've seen many accounts of this incident, all phrased in similarly cautious terms and none of them attributed to a specific contemporary source.
Eternity Street: Violence and Justice in Frontier Los Angeles
Historian John Mack Faragher has spent his career writing about frontiers in general and the American West specifically. In Eternity Street: Violence and Justice in Frontier Los Angeles, he considers the structure and culture of violence in a frontier society, how violence reproduces and polices itself in a so-called "honor culture,"* and the slow development of an official justice system in Los Angeles in the mid-nineteenth century. The result is a fascinating look at the competing forces of official justice and vigilantism as southern California moved from Mexican to American control.
Drawing on a combination of official records, contemporary newspaper accounts, personal papers, memoirs and autobiographies, Faragher tells individual stories of murder, retaliation, domestic violence, racism and greed. At the same time, he never loses sight of the larger history of the region. He sets detailed accounts of conflicts between individuals within the contexts of the conquest of southern California by first Mexico and then the United States, the Texas rebellion, the American Civil War** and the gold rush of 1848.
This is not the American West of American fable. Faragher's Los Angeles is a frontier outpost with no white-hatted heroes and plenty of ethnic conflict. Native Americans newly freed from control of the missions, native angeleños, African-American slaves and freedmen, North American adventurers, and the United States Army and Navy compete for resources, political control, and women with blades, guns and lances.***
Eternity Street is an ugly story, beautifully told.
*We've seen this concept before here in the Margins. It's easy to idealize honor culture in the past:medieval knights, eighteenth century duelists, and samurai warriors all enjoy a certain glamour in popular culture. A quick look at how it plays out in street gangs makes it clear that honor culture centers on male violence. It's cock fighting, with men instead of roosters.
**And you thought I'd taken a break from the Civil War!
*** At one point in the narrative, the United States Army and Navy came close to armed conflict with each other over who was in charge, suggesting an honor culture of a different variety.
Most of this review previously appeared in Shelf Awareness for Readers.
Mercy Street and M*A*S*H
A BIT OF NEWS: On Monday, January 25, from 4 to 5 PM Eastern Standard Time, I'm going to be the guest host at #LitChat, a real time Twitter chat that brings authors and book lovers to talk about bookish things. If you're a Twitter user, it's a great chance for you to ask me questions about Heroines of Mercy Street or anything else you've been wanting to known. If you're not a Twitter user, maybe this will inspire you to join. (This link gives you all the details about #LitChat and how to participate: http://litchat.com/ )
Hope to "see" you there.
And now to the topic at hand:
Volunteers tending the wounded in the field of battle. Alfred R. Waud
My Own True Love and I watched the premiere episode of Mercy Street last week. Early in show, the main character, Mary Phinney von Olnhausen,* walked into the lobby of Mansion House hospital in Alexandria, Virginia, for the first time--past the bleeding bodies of wounded soldiers waiting for help. My Own True Love turned to me and said "Isn't that a little over the top unless they are right next to a battlefield?"
My first thought was Alexandria was next door to a battlefield for much of the war. That was one of the reasons that it became an administrative, transportation and medical hub for the Union Army
My second thought was that the scene was actually pretty tame compared to the first-hand accounts I had read of wounded soldiers arriving at Civil War hospitals--accounts that reminded me of scenes from M*A*S*H in terms of the blood, sense of urgency, and confusion. (No helicopters, though.)
The historical equivalent of the scene from Mercy Street is a case in point. The real life Mary Phinney von Olnhausen arrived at Mansion House Hospital in August, 1862, only a few days after the Battle of Cedar Mountain**and was plunged into medical chaos.
On August 9, a corps of Union soldiers led by General Nathaniel P. Banks stumbled across Stonewall Jackson’s infantry at the base of Cedar Mountain, near Culpeper Court House, Virginia. Hostilities ensued. Out-numbered three to one by Jackson, Banks lost more than a third of his men: 314 killed, 1,445 wounded, and 622 missing.
As was too often the case in the early days of the war, the horror continued after the battle was over. Thomas A. McParlin, medical director of the federal Army of Virginia at the time and later medical director of the Army of the Potomac, established dressing stations near the battlefield and an evacuation hospital at Culpeper Court House. The intention was that military trains*** would take on wounded soldiers and carry them the fifty miles to Alexandria for treatment. By the next day it was clear to McParlin that the surgeons on the ground, overwhelmed by the numbers of wounded, had lost track of the primary goal: sending the wounded to Alexandria. Instead they focused on amputations they believed were needed to save men’s lives; one doctor alone performed twenty-two thigh amputations and an uncounted number of arm amputations in a twenty-four-hour period.
No one had the time to attend to soldiers with relatively minor wounds. Supplies and tempers ran short. Even though trains were available, every building that could be turned into a shelter—churches, the Masonic hall, private homes, and even a tobacco barn—was filled with hundreds of wounded men. Hundreds more lay in the hot August sun awaiting evacuation, many of them dehydrated and groaning for water. McParlin sent the orders a second time, reminding doctors that the wounded were to be sent on by train as soon after they arrived as possible. Hours later, he discovered that nothing had changed; he went to Culpeper Court House himself and saw to it personally that the first train of railroad cars was loaded with men and on its way. After nine days of hell, the last trainload of wounded from Culpeper Court House reached Washington on August 18.
Von Olnhausen expected her first assignment to be helping the wounded at Culpepper Court House. Instead she was sent to Mansion House Hospital, arriving just in time to see the wounded from Cedar Mountain arrive, still in the condition in which they had been taken off the battlefield. Some had lain outside in the summer heat for three or four days “almost without clothing, their wounds never dressed, so dirty and so wretched.” Those who could walk were helped on foot into the hospital. The worst were carried in on stretchers. Those who died in the hospital were carried out almost as quickly.
Von Olnhausen had no chance to find her way around the hospital or learn her duties. Instead an orderly showed her into the surgical ward, where someone told her what to do, but not how to do it. Her informal experience nursing family and friends was not adequate preparation for dealing with the effects of cannon shells, bayonets, and the new deadly bullets known as minnie balls on the human body. Faced with carnage on a scale she had not been able to imagine, she wanted to throw herself down and give up. It seemed like a hopeless task. The only thing she could do for the soldiers now was learn: she followed the doctors and watched as they examined and dressed soldiers’ wounds. “So I began my work,” she wrote in her unfinished memoir, “I might say night and day.”
Similar scenes appear in the letters and memoirs of Louisa May Alcott, Hannah Ropes, Amy Bradley, and others. Again and again, the wounded flooded into hospitals: ragged, mud-caked and bloody, carried on stretchers or staggering on their own feet, their faces drawn with exhaustion and pain. In short, incoming!
*Based on a real Civil War nurse of that name whose story, drawn from her letters and memoir, forms the backbone for Heroines of Mercy Street. (Commerical over. You may now return to your regularly scheduled blog post.)
**Also known prior to the way as Slaughter's Mountain. After the battle, one Union army surgeon remarked that it was "truly named, for the slaughter was tremendous on both sides.)
***In some ways the helicopters of their day