Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: Civil War Voices and Views
- MEDICAL AND SURGICAL MEMOIRS
- ACCOUNTS OF NURSING
- With the US Sanitary Commission: On the Hospital Boat Wilson Small: The Other Side of War
- Evacuation from Virginia, 1862: Hospital Transports
- Hospital Routine
- A Death in the Ward: Hospital Sketches
- Nurse and Spy: Nurse and Spy in the Union Army
- Front-line Nursing: Reminiscences of My Life in Camp
- ‘The Mute Look that Rolls and Moves’: Walt Whitman's Civil War
- Specimen Days & Collect
- MEDICAL FACILITIES AND PATHOLOGY
- PHOTOGRAPHY
- AMPUTATIONS AND PROSTHETIC LIMBS
- IN THE FIELD OF BATTLE
- POST-WAR NARRATIVES
- Contributors
- Select Bibliography
- Index
- Plates
Hospital Routine
from ACCOUNTS OF NURSING
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: Civil War Voices and Views
- MEDICAL AND SURGICAL MEMOIRS
- ACCOUNTS OF NURSING
- With the US Sanitary Commission: On the Hospital Boat Wilson Small: The Other Side of War
- Evacuation from Virginia, 1862: Hospital Transports
- Hospital Routine
- A Death in the Ward: Hospital Sketches
- Nurse and Spy: Nurse and Spy in the Union Army
- Front-line Nursing: Reminiscences of My Life in Camp
- ‘The Mute Look that Rolls and Moves’: Walt Whitman's Civil War
- Specimen Days & Collect
- MEDICAL FACILITIES AND PATHOLOGY
- PHOTOGRAPHY
- AMPUTATIONS AND PROSTHETIC LIMBS
- IN THE FIELD OF BATTLE
- POST-WAR NARRATIVES
- Contributors
- Select Bibliography
- Index
- Plates
Summary
Jane Woolsey (1830–1891) was living in New York at the outbreak of war. She participated in the Women's Central Relief Association, a precursor of the US Sanitary Commission, and in 1861–62 visited a number of New York hospitals as a member of the Women's Auxiliary Commission. In 1863, while training in Rhode Island, she was invited to serve as supervisor of the Fairfax Seminary Hospital in Alexandria, Virginia.
The following excerpts are from Woolsey's Hospital Days: Reminiscence of a Civil War Nurse (New York: D. Van Nostrand, 1868). Hospital Days gives a series of vignettes showing the day-to-day routine activities of a nurse during the war: dietary measures, visits by the Superintendent, chaplain's visits, etc. She noted that ‘the whole air and tone of a hospital ward change and rise after a few days of a woman's presence’ (p. 43). Her record includes accounts of conversations with patients and sample letters from family members of deceased patients.
[from ‘Superintendent's Day’]
The woman-nurse in each little ward-room receives her tray or trays, having her china plates and cups, her knives and forks and tumblers, set out in order beforehand; divides the food according to a duplicate of the ward return hanging over her table, and the men-nurses carry it about. She follows immediately down the ward, helps and feeds those who are unable to help themselves, and sees that all have enough. If anything goes wrong, she is directed to send word at once to the Superintendent. She has means of heating over any simple thing if the patient does not incline to it at the fixed hour. A sick man will often take his food nicely if he may have his own time about it, and does not feel himself under observation. In critical cases a fresh ration is prepared instead of the rechauffe. The small special blanks (F) are meant for these and all other cases of emergency; or the woman-nurse can have anything urgently needed at the moment, by sending her own written request for it. Extra rations of one or two articles – such as beef-tea, oysters, eggs – are always on hand in the kitchen. The Government ration is so generous that when honestly used there is almost always margin enough for extra calls without extra requisitions for raw material.
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- Life and LimbPerspectives on the American Civil War, pp. 22 - 25Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2015