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Ever notice how a navigating a hardship ends up preparing you to succeed at some bigger challenge to come?
That's what happened to many of the women who forged their way into the nursing profession during the American Civil War.
Nurses' Civil War Battle Changed them,
and Changed the World
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The author, Pamela D. Toler agreed to talk to me about the book, and right off, I told her I tend to be queasy.
She assured me the book touches lightly on the blood and gore of battle
wounds, and focuses on the doggedness of the women nurses. "Just getting to the hospital or battlefield required these women to push against societies assumptions about what ladies should and should not do.
Georgeanna Woolsey was a New York socialite who took all the trimming off one of her dresses and a bonnet, dressed her hair as plainly as possible and, to the amazement of her family, bluffed
her way into a slot in the nurses training program.
Once women got to their posts, they confronted doctors who didn't want them there." Georgeanna wrote: 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. (Below) Fredericksburg, Virginia: The woman seated in the hospital doorway is volunteer nurse Abby Gibbons of New York City (Source: descendant Angela Schear, Oct. 2013, Library of Congress)
Pamela says, "The nurses who didn't give up and go home, learned to cope with the sights and smells of a military hospital—dysentery and amputations were both ugly
things.
"More than once I sat in the library with tears running down my face while I read their first hand accounts of their experiences during the war. (This does not make you popular with librarians in rare book rooms. Take tissues and be sure you don't drip.)"
But ultimately, admiration won out over heartbreak as she wrote about how these nurses gathered up their
courage and learned not only to bandage wounds but to elbow their way through a hostile bureaucracy.They became advocates for their patients.
And after the war many of them used their new skills at organizing and working within male-dominated bureaucracies to make the world around them a better place. If you look at an American reform movement after 1865, the odds are you'll find a former Civil War nurse in the middle of things. The message Pamela has taken from these Civil War nurses is that the first step to changing the world is challenging yourself.
Sometimes I think I get enough challenge just waking up in the morning, but these women went out and
grabbed trouble by the horns and hung on. For women of their time, they were downright amazing!
What's an amazing woman for our time look like? I'd love to hear your thoughts on that.
For more on Author Pamela D. Toler and her book Heroines of Mercy Street click here. I must confess it's still on my to-be-read list. If you've read it, please let me know what you think.
Here are the books I read this week. They are all written for teens, but interesting and compelling for adults, too. I enjoyed them all, but if had to pick one, it would be the
first, Breakthrough.
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Have you read a great book? Tell me about it. Have a burning question? Let me know. Until next week....
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