The Inhospitable Hospital: Gender and Professionalism in Civil War Medicine

Gendered spaces, gendered pages: Union women in Civil War nurse narratives

“…Jane E. Schultz observes that women's “diaries, memoirs, letters, and commemorative narratives allow us to observe the evolution of contested models of medical professionalism”21 (p. 364), in which “Civil War nurses' eschewal of medical models of professionalism was a protest against male authority”21 (p. 365), when nurses confronted male surgeons “over issues of corruption, bureaucratic inhumanity, and morality in Civil War hospitals”21 (p. 366). Women nurses' published Civil War narratives, therefore, represent the traces of those conflicts, sometimes in explicit, sometimes in coded ways.…”

“…These gendered pages represented, documented, and, to some degree, re-produced the contested gendered spaces during the American Civil War. Jane E. Schultz notes that in wartime writing, women, like their male counterparts, “invoked patriotism when explaining to friends and relatives why they had decided to work in military hospitals”21 (pp. 363–392), while registering their dissent from a male medical establishment.…”

“…First, Schultz notes that, although “[female] nurses' styles of self-expression differed widely, they wrote about their patients with a singular degree of material specificity, and they resisted surgeons' tendency to blur patients' individual characteristics…[male] Surgeons' diaries do not show nearly the same individualisation of suffering. They were more likely to refer to their patients in the abstract or to refer to the clinical details of a particular treatment without mentioning the soldier's name at all”21 (pp. 378–379).…”

Medical Advancements of the United States Civil War

“…Dr. Jane E. Although the situation was better for nurses attached to military regiments, it was harder for a woman to achieve this placement. 34 Progress was, however, made for female nurses as early as 1861, when the Sanitary Commission and Surgeon General William Hammond publicly favoured accepting them over soldier nurses, because they were "more docile and efficient than men and were superior morale builders." 35 Of course, this mandate did not become publicly accepted without the hard work, dedication, and competence of many women who put their lives at stake to improve the practice of nursing.…”

The Gendered Geography of War: Confederate Women as Camp Followers

“…145 Kate Cummings recorded her first exposure to nursing in her diary during the outbreak the war, recalling; "I sat up all night, bathing the men's wounds, and giving them water…the foul air from this mass of human beings at first made me giddy and sick… and when we give the men anything kneel, in blood and water…" 146 Hannah Ropes recalled a patient who had been shot through the shoulder and how she had to change his dressing three times a day by "cutting the shirt open on the shoulder, down the front and taking out the left sleeve." 147 Pember graphically recorded the wounds she encountered, including a patient who had been shot twice in the face, "knocking out the teeth…the swollen lips turned out, and the mouth filled with blood, matter, fragments of teeth from amidst all of which the maggots in countless numbers swarmed and writhed..." These recollections of a day's work reveal that nursing was arduous, unsettling, and unsanitary, aspects that did not conform to the traditional lifestyle of privileged Southern women.…”