Livestream Rerun: Civil War Nurses

[Music] [Music] hello and welcome i am marie walker and i am a history student at the university of georgia and today i will be talking about civil war nurses now why was nursing so important during the american civil war well this was the first time that nurses were actually recognized female nurses that is were recognized by the us and confederate governments and this was an incredibly huge step in uh women getting into the nursing field so some of these women were actually paid for their services if you were a matron of a hospital you might get forty dollars a month and then a lot of them were volunteers or they were paid in room and board now how did this become a thing that women were able to do well florence nightingale paved the way for women to get into nursing during the american civil war because the decade earlier during the crimea war which britain was involved in florence nightingale and a group of ladies got together and revolutionized the way hospital care was done she floys nightingale had some wonderful ideas she thought that instead of being cooped up in a dark smelly room in their own filth soldiers who were recuperating from illness or wounds should have good nutrition good fresh air and be clean and the mortality rate of the soldiers that were under florence nightingale's care dramatically decreased so when the time came for the american civil war and which started in the 1860s the idea of women nurses was already present in people's minds whether or not it was generally in practice but since the civil war came and almost all men were called to be called and joined either the union or confederate army or were conscripted into those armies it created a for a way for women to get into those roles that were generally dominated by men but this doesn't mean that women were always accepted easily into these roles a lot of surgeons did have pushback and were uneasy to say the least about having women be nurses for them in their hospitals but with good determination and perseverance a lot of women did end up volunteering and becoming nurses and greatly increased morale and decreased mortality rate nursing looked very different in the north and in the south in the north you had dorothea dix who was in charge of the nursing corps now dorothea dix she was a formidable woman and sometimes even called dragon dicks had some very strict rules about who was allowed to be a nurse for starters you had to be over 30 you had to be married and you had to be homely looking so you had to meet at least those three criteria to be a nurse for dorothea dix in the north at least during the start of the war she would train women to then become hospital matrons and they were not necessarily trained medically but they were trained to be hospital administrators and to care for the men now in the south they were not as well organized in pretty much everything which included nursing nursing groups came together from people who it was grassroots organizations one such nurse who came from a grassroot organization was kate cummings kate cummings was from mobile alabama and she was the daughter of a wealthy merchant and she went on a mission trips of sorts with her church which was a group of ladies a surgeon and a preacher to the battle of shiloh in 1862 and it was there that she then was introduced to the idea of nursing during the civil war she had no medical training or medical knowledge in a formal education sense and it was pretty much all on the job training but once she was introduced to this and saw such a great need for people to be taking care of the men she ended up being in charge of several hospitals in the north georgia area by the end of the civil war so what would adorn the duties of a nurse be well they were basically all around caregivers they would cook for the men make sure they had meals make sure that their wards were the wards were clean they would read to the men write for the men chat with them keep their spirits up pray with them sing with them and kind of a little bit of a morale boost and then also they would help dress their wounds wash their faces and be basic cleanliness as well sometimes they would assist in surgery a lot of these women were volunteers with very little medical knowledge other than caring for their loved ones at home but they could learn on the job and then there were also some women who did have medical knowledge as well who served in these positions so the most common surgery during the civil war was an amputation if the civil war was fought today with the same weapons that were used back then there would still be the same number of amputations because the caliber of the bullet would just shatter the bone beyond repair now the way an amputation was done would first you would have a tourniquet now the tourniquet would go on the arm let's say i got shot in the forearm here so the tourniquet would go on above the elbow and then you would tighten it here don't worry i'm not going to actually amputate my arm so you would tighten it until it was nice and tight and cut off the blood flow the arm there then you would leave the tourniquet on and you would make an incision with a knife and the incision would be a circular one going all the way around the arm right below the elbow you would then pull back the skin and muscle until you got to the bone and then you would use a saw that looks fairly like this one to then saw off the bone if the surgeon had time he would try to either pull out capillaries and thread them off to stop bleeding or um he would sometimes use like bone nippers to then clean around the wound uh and the bone because once you saw it has a lot of little prickly pokey parts but sometimes after large battles this was not possible just because of time so then after you would saw off the bone hopefully get the bone nippers and such you would then pull down the skin fold it into like a little triangle envelope basically they fold your skin in like an envelope and then they would sew it off and then you would bandage it bandages by the end of civil war were becoming very scarce and a lot of women who were volunteering as nurses would then go home and rip up linens that were theirs and tablecloths and petticoats to then make bandages for the men there's actually one story of a nurse who had basically no medical training and she came and she walked into a hospital and she was overcome by the scene and fainted and then one of the doctors told her not to come back because she was being more troublesome than she was helpful but she was so determined to help she was decided you know what i am coming back and i'm going to prove that i am a valuable part of this and she came back she had ripped up all of her linens at home and all of her petticoats and came back with a big bundle of bandages that she had and presented them and then she was like tell me what to do and they're like okay you can go stand by the door because we're still not sure if you're going to faint or not and we'll tell you when we need you to do something so she stood by the door and then she eventually worked her way up to where she was caring for two men completely like almost on her own um until they recuperated and then she would be assigned more men until they recuperated and this is a lot of this isn't um not to say well documented because there's a lot of really great um diaries that some women kept like kate coming she kept a whole journal about her time which was published right after the civil war but a lot of these were just stories that happened because women weren't necessarily like drafted into a nursing court it was there was a battle that happened in my hometown and i went to help and that is how a lot of women became nurses during the civil war um it wasn't something they necessarily set out to do is something that kind of just happened they saw a need and they filled it at least that's very much in the south where you had a lot of battles coming to your front door or to your farmland in the north it was a little bit different because they actually did have a much more organized nursing core you did set out to do that and you were very institutionalized um in how everything worked um there is a lot of really famous women who were civil war nurses one of those might be clara barton you've probably heard of her she's called the angel of the battlefield and she got that title at the battle of shiloh which is the bloodiest day in american history was still is she drove her team of wagons all night with supplies that she had organized herself to get to the battle of shallow in time because the army was marching so fast the union supplies was not there in time for the battle so she arrived just as the battle was beginning and was able to give doctors the much needed supplies that they need that they needed to perform surgery she had lamps and oil so that they could perform surgery well into the night and then she went to work and she would take water to the wounded and she even wandered so close to the battlefield where a bullet hole a bullet went through her sleeve of her dress as she was leaning down to give a wounded soldier a drink of water she was not necessarily incredibly close to the front lines but i guess she had wandered towards the fighting and the fighting had wandered towards her and then she stayed in a cabin and cooked and fed the men and did all that she could for them and continued to work for the good of the union for the rest of the war and even after the war she worked at the missing she organized the missing soldiers office to where she tried to reunite families who were separated during the war and then even after that she went on to found the american red cross which has had a lasting impact upon our society today another incredible woman during the civil war was dr mary walker and she was the first surgeon in the union army and she was even awarded the congressional medal of honor for her service she worked in tent hospitals at fredericksburg and some of the very incredibly bloody battles during civil war she was out there in the field hospitals performing operations probably a great deal of amputations and she was even captured by confederate forces during this time and held prisoner for a while until she was finally released in 1865 she was awarded the congressional medal of honor and she is the first and only woman to be awarded such an honor the american government then rescinded the medal for a time because they weren't sure if they could give it to a woman and if she was technically part of the union army or not um but she continued to wear it because she had believed that she had earned it and then it was awarded back to her post morticisly so she does still have her congressional medal of honor i think you want to go into q and a yeah we can do some q a i think that's a lot of yeah so we've got a lot of questions first one is from leslie jones and if you could repeat the question for the audience what kind of food did they prepare for the soldier so they asked what kind of food did they prepare for the soldiers good question basically whatever you could get your hands on food was incredibly scarce so if there was a chicken outside well then you're having some chicken soup or some chickens do it's kind of a whatever you could find you threw in a pot and that is what you ate do you know some other examples of the food like like salted pork so the army uh would provide hardtech which is kind of like a very stale bread of sorts so that was something that was rationed to the soldiers that they would probably also be rationed to wounded soldiers there's actually some kind of humorous um uh stories about women who were coming they were high society ladies who wanted to do their part and they were really they were really trying but they came with like silver tea platters and we're going to like serve tea to the soldiers and then the nurses were like that's very very kind but not exactly what we need right now um that's interesting so we're so was there a lot of different classes that were nurses yes so there's a lot of different classes that were nurses and this was kind of a huge social upheaval idea so there were some really high society ladies who would come and they didn't really want to clean or do any of the what they considered tasks that were like beneath them that might be like something a maid would do so but they would come and they would sit and they would talk to the soldiers and they would write to the soldiers they would roll bandages and like bring tea and it was very controversial at the time because for a lady to care for a man especially if that lady was not married there was um tension between what a woman would be like if they were to see something inappropriate um it was they was some society people had a hard time reconciling what that would mean can you talk about how did they get soldiers how do they get to this the injured men and how they get off the field we have a picture of a civil war ambulance so if you can repeat the question there so we had a question that was how would the soldiers get to from the battlefield to the hospital so here we have a hospital ambulance so this is taking soldiers from the battlefield to a hospital so there were several different types of hospitals and such um you would have a field hospital so a field hospital would look like this it's basically a tent uh very minimal shelter so this is where the vast majority of operations are going to be taking place right off the battlefield this is kind of like your trauma center and then you would either be transported by another ambulance or by railroad to a convalescent place so hospitals like we have today they they did not exist the idea of hospitals you only went to a hospital if you did not have a family member to take care of you otherwise you were in your house and your family members were taking care of you in your house and the doctor would come to your house sometimes surgeries were performed in your front parlor so the idea of hospitals did not really exist as they did in as they do in modern times so you would have hospitals makeshift hospitals being set up in hotels in barns and people's houses were taken over to be hospitals because they didn't exist as we think of them today can you talk about the types of medicines that were used types of medicines very good so a lot of times you think of everyone always points to that one amputation scene and gone with the wind where they're screaming bloody murder as their you know had nothing to put them under as their arm is being amputated and that is not necessarily always the case you had chloroform you had ether and these would be used to sedate men before operations happened um sometimes there were sordid shortages of these but it's not the the gruesome scene that everyone generally thinks of that was very very indeed rare if it did happen at all what was the most deadly part of the war what kind of injuries or diseases so disease actually killed two-thirds of the casualties during the american civil war smallpox was a huge killer of soldiers because if you think about it we have generally almost all of the men ages 15 to 40 all going off to fight in this war that has not this a scale of war that has not been seen on american soil they have all come from their hometowns that they probably have not gone a radius of 50 miles outside and now they're all living in camps together they have no idea that germs exist or what makes them sick so they're going to the bathroom in water that they're also drinking out of because they don't understand that that is bad and they're also bringing all of their germs from home to the camp so disease ran rampant through these through the civil war encampments smallpox cholera uh dysentery um all highly contagious or easy to get and if you're living in an unclean environment and very deadly were the nurses at risk of getting these diseases and how do they prevent that if anything so nurses were also at risk for getting these if they were not already like immune to them if they didn't have them as a child there are nurses who claire barton actually came down with an illness and was sent home for a time until she recovered so yes the nurses were definitely at risk they didn't do a whole whole lot to prevent these because germ theory was very very new and most people didn't know about it at this time the civil war was a time of great medical advancement because so many people needed medicine and necessity is a mother of invention at some points and the motivator of research so a lot of things were discovered after the civil war but they did not know about it then were there also nurses in the navy on ships i don't think there were female nurses on ships and if that was documented i do not know but a lot of times women were at a no they weren't even necessarily on the field all that much they were generally at like the second dairy part of the hospitals that we talked about like the ones that have been taken over hospitals that have been uh established in hotels or houses um and things in that nature that's where the uh women nurses the majority of them were obviously some were over on the battlefield like claire barton can you talk about the nurse's pay what was the typical salary so some women who were actually who did get paid while they got i think it was 40 a month if you were a hospital matron which means like you were the administrator of that hospital basically and that was if you were in the north and one of dorfia dix's qualified nurses otherwise you may or may not get paid the confederate government did promise pay to kate cummings and it's unclear if she how much of what she was promised she got because of the confederate government collapsing at the end of the civil war but they were given like room and board as part of their pay and a lot of women especially the high society ones that we had talked about did not want pay because or would not accept a position that was a technically a paid position because they didn't want to be a working woman do you were there african-american nurses african-american nurses there are definitely some of those um sometimes uh like a high society lady would take her enslaved woman with her when she was visiting and then the enslaved woman would probably was documented as doing more of like the actual cleaning and bathing and tending of wounds while she like sat there and talked to the man and then of course there are some that would have volunteered themselves to help the men that were fighting were there big differences between nurses in the north and nurses in the south there was a big difference because women in the north they were probably part of the nursing corps and they were sent places by dorothea dix it was far far more organized and in the south it was there was a battle that happened in my town and now there are people who are bleeding in my posture and i'm going to go help them of course there were also some people like organized units like the ladies aid societies of different states but there was not until the very end of the war a confederate nursing corps to be precise it was very much states and communities coming together to put on their own types of nursing cores it was not a government sanctioned activity for most of the war were they still using techniques like leading blood or using leeches um that was still a prevalent medical idea oh yes i'm sorry repeating the question so were they still using techniques like bloodletting and leeches at this time yes that was still an idea of medical practice was it done in like an incredibly large amount during the civil war by nurses not necessarily because nurses were more general tear takers and didn't have a whole lot to do and with the idea of treatment they if they were doing a treatment is because they were told to do it by a doctor but most the time the surgeon himself would do that they there was actually one documentation about that kate cummings recorded in her diary that um a woman actually came up with a type of like a lotion as how she described it to stop inflammation and sometimes they would let blood to stop to relieve inflammation but this woman she came up with an idea of a lotion to stop inflammation but the doctors didn't ex one doctor did not accept it because it was made by a lady but then another doctor saw how it worked well and requested more of it so there's also ideas of like home remedies that these women would have known like the back of their hand there is a book called the family nurse that was published in 1837 which was supposedly a a staple in everyone's household and they would have known treatments that work from that book which included natural remedies like making mustard plaster or like the different properties of rosemary and thyme and those type of natural home remedies as well as sometimes they did indeed use like cocaine and arsenic and opium in medicines um during this time because they thought that that was fine um during this time they didn't realize what dangers that those can do as well so there was a vast majority of medicine that kept improving i'm sure some doctors were still of the old school of practice and did indeed let blood but that wasn't the types of injuries that these men were sustaining were not such that would need bloodletting and leeches they were more worried about infection and gangrene uh setting in after amputations and if you get gangrene either you have to amputate more of your limb or your it gets into your blood and you will die someone wants to know if mary todd lincoln was a nurse ah yes some sources okay so the question was uh was mary todd lincoln a nurse and some sources state that mary spent many hours as a volunteer nurse in union hospitals while others maintained that she functioned more as a visitor who brought food to the wounded like she would read to them and write letters for them and raised money so but no matter what the truth is she appeared to put her aside her own problems and grief and showed great empathy towards the soldiers so again this goes back to our other topic of conversation of high society women functioning as nurses versus middle class and lower class women functioning as nurses and how their roles as nurses differed what what would happen when a soldier died what would be the process to getting them to back to their families all right so when a soldier died which many of them unfortunately did it depended on where you were if you were close to your family or if anyone knew who you were it was an incredibly heartbreaking time for many many people in america as a lot of people had no idea what would happen to their fellow loved ones kate cummings writes in her journal as she and her group of ladies went to be nurses at the battle of shiloh there was actually a father who went with them to retrieve his son's body because he knew that his son had died at the battle of shiloh so some families if you were able to would go and retrieve the body of their loved one if they were notified and they knew where to find you and then bring you home for burial with your family or in your church's graveyard other times you were put into a mass grave because there were so many casualties of war that's all that they could do and a lot of times if your entire regiment was killed then no one was going to know who you were to identify your body there are actually heartbreaking accounts of soldiers who wrote their names and pinned it inside their their jackets in hopes that they would be able to be identified if they were to perish because this is before the idea of dog tags or anything of that nature that would be their hope of identification to be brought back to their families but a lot of them never made it and that's another reason clara barton after the war opened the missing soldiers office because a lot of people didn't know if their loved one was deceased or just misplaced if they were going to come back or not and she was able to reunite a lot of families but also sadly inform a lot of families that their loved one had been deceased and they didn't know that until after the war there are also on a slightly more i guess amusing note some accounts of women who believe their husbands were dead and remarried only to have their husbands show up several months later and then i i don't know what they did then that's something to work out um how young were the youngest nurses could we see younger girls as nurses so if you were in the north and under dorothea dix's rule you had to be at least 30. and so dorothea dix she wanted you to be 30 married and homely looking so i would like to think i don't meet any of those qualifications i'm definitely under 30 and i'm not married and i like to think i'm not homely looking so but if you were down south again if there was a person who needed help in your yard you would technically qualify as a civil war nurse but a lot of these women were older a lot of them were married just because the idea of propriety and a young woman not going and being unattended with uh possibly vulgar men the society of the time did not like that idea so a lot of the nurses were generally on the older side they were not incredibly young and do you know about how many nurses were serving in the civil war so it's really hard to get a good number of how many nurses were serving in the civil war because you have a lot of volunteers who were never counted who either and then what qualifies you as a civil war nurse um does visiting a hospital qualify you as a civil war nurse or does helping in surgery qualify you as a civil war nurse um it would again it would be much easier to figure out in the union almost impossible to figure out in the south if they were not recorded what medical advancements today originated from the civil war if you know of any of medical advancements um medical advancements of the time i'm trying to think i know there were a lot going on not necessarily i think they figured out how to do amputations really fast that was definitely one the ideas of different treatments for some things the idea of inoculation and uh advanced a little bit more that was been back since the 1700s but it kind of came back again because again you had you're trying to stop disease um germ theory blossomed right after the civil war when they figured out that little things make you sick and ideas of sanitation they didn't exactly understand quite why being clean made things better but they understood that it did so a lot of ideas of like sanitation and cleanliness started to blossom during this time this i wouldn't say the civil war like made a bunch of medical advancements necessarily but it created opportunity for medical advancements to be made directly after because during the war you're trying to deal with the massive amount of casualties that you had right before you you weren't doing like medical research but a lot of doctors saw what was happening in their tents and then we're able to go and build off of that can you speak to the use of prosthetics during this time yes so a lot of amputations did occur which means people were without limbs so to be able to walk again you would need the use of a prosthetic so a prosthetic leg a prosthetic arm hand these would be generally made out of wood they would work with varying degrees of accuracy because there was no idea of like standard of them um so you could have something as crude as like a peg leg that's just you uh would have it like it's just a stick of wood that you would then try to attach to your leg so that you would be able to walk and then there are some which are a little more fancy uh with like metal hinges for knees and such um they would not neces that would be something like if you had an amputation during the civil war that is something you would not necessarily be like given right after you had your amputation that's something that you are going to then go home and try to figure out and navigate your new life um with a missing limb which you could either then so it really depended on your area and who was able to make them at that time uh and i think a lot of soldiers filed for the u.s government to pay for them to pay for their prosthetics but that was something that that was an after the war activity um mostly what kind of training would it take to be a nurse at this time so dorothea dix had what she considered to be her training course a lot of it was more or less in hospital administration and how to be like a proper nurse in hospital sanitation it wouldn't necessarily be like medical training like this is how you perform an operation because a lot of nurses were more or less general caregivers and hospital administrators for a very large part obviously some did work in the operating room and assisted in operations but the vast majority did not so can you talk to us about some of the equipment that you have and maybe show the uh yes medical equipment yes yes so if you would like to come over here so here are some of the things that we had uh for the oh there we go all right so these are what you would use to pull the bullet out so if you can see there is a small indentation here which would be used to grab the bullet you would then you would find the bullet with the bullet probe so basically you would stick this in the wound until you found the bullet and then you would retrieve it using this bullet probe scissors so you would not want the bullet to stay in you because it could cause either greater disease to set in the caliber of these bullets at this time a lot of them did and they they were they would not go through you they would stick with you and stay in you and cause much more damage if they were still inside you so they had to go and pull them out using this equipment here let's see what else do we have we have just some small surgical scissors that you would use uh if you were to do surgery they cut uh here they have just a little bit here and here let's see we have this which would then be used so you can see here it has it has a lot of little jaggy parts and then a point and this would be used to drill into the skull and relieve pressure on the brain if you were had bleeding on the brain that and your head was swelling they would drill a small hole in your skull an attempt or large hole in your skull an attempt to relieve pressure here we have an enema which would relieve your bowels let's see what else do we have here here we have just like medical forceps scissors um and if you're trying to retrieve something other than a bullet if you're trying to get like bone parts or bone fragments out you might use these because they have small ridges on the inside here to grab let's see what else do we have we have wait is that ah this this is dental equipment that we have here this would you would put around like your tooth and then it would hook it and then you would pull so this is what you would use to pull teeth do you have a still of that oh yes okay got it so here's a little hook that would get your tooth in it like so and then you would pull it so it would hold it like that and then you would pull all right i think i think that's a good amount of our medical equipment that we have here okay so we'll get right to the middle and we'll answer all right one more question and that is simply what got you so interested in civil war nurses and how was your research gone ah yes so i am a civil war reenactor um i was actually wearing this dress uh that i had made this was one of my first um things oh i made my outfit that happened that's the thing that i did oh if we went here i like talking about fashion so we're going to talk about my dress for a moment um so i made this dress and it was a dark color i just like blue but i was talking to some other reenactors who he was uh reenacted as a doctor and he's like that dress is perfect to be a civil war nurse dress and i was like oh fantastic and he's like do you want to come reenact with me and be my nurse and i was like yes yes i would so from there he gave me some information i have done a lot of research on my own obviously i've been talking about the journal of kate cummings which is a fantastic resource there's also a book called the mothers of invention which has a really good chapter and really talks about the intricacies of high society ladies trying to be nurses obviously there's wonderful examples like i actually found out about dr mary walker because i was googling myself one day because my name's marie walker and it came up dr mary walker and she's a fantastic woman that i wish we talked more about because she she was the first female surgeon and the only woman to win a congressional medal of honor how awesome is that and then there's also let's see other good books about claire barton you can find a lot of wonderful information about her online and things like that and where can people talk about historical builds oh yes so i also do a lot of other reenactments at different eras but i got into it because of civil war nursing but i like i said i made my own outfits and i talked about that on i have a youtube facebook page and an instagram called historical bell b-e-l-l-e and uh there i talk about more uh awesome women in history and also about sewing historical garments um so if you are interested in that you can check me out there all right we'll just conclude with a nice nice thank you all right so thank you so much for watching i would also like to offer an incredibly heartfelt thank you to all the doctors nurses and healthcare workers out there right now on the front lines of a very different looking battle that has we haven't seen in a very very long time so thank you to all of y'all out there keeping us safe i hope everyone is doing well thank you for watching [Music] you [Music]

Channel: Northeast Georgia History Center

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Id: Gko_NtP02Gc

Length: 45min 11sec (2711 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 23 2021