Nursing in the Civil War is "not for the squeamish"

Tuesday, April 8

Today is my mom's 94th birthday, so I've been thinking about her a lot.  For over forty years her career was nursing - private duty, maternity, CCU/ICU, and finally supervisor of the chemical dependency treatment unit of a state hospital.  She is not "squeamish."  She was a professional through and through.

Interestingly enough, her father did not encourage her intent to become a nurse.  He believed teaching was the proper career for a woman (imagine that in the mid 1930's) - a career for women, that is!  But he encouraged her to work for one year and if, after that time, she still wanted to become a nurse, he would support that decision and drive her down to Swedish Hospital School of Nursing himself in 1939.  He did, she did, and that's how it all came to be.

All this is related to the Civil War, believe it or not.  When reading the history of the Swedish Nursing School, I discovered that since the time of the Civil War, nursing was not considered a proper field for women to enter.  Almost all medical staff during the War were men, although Clara Barton's incredible work stands out as a profound model of women as nurses. 

Last week I discovered a new children's book in our bookstore down here, "You Wouldn't Want to Be a Nurse in the American Civil War," by Kathryn Senior.  She added the subtitle, in quite small print, "if you are squeamish."  The entire book is a surprisingly vivid description of medical conditions during the Civil War describing, for example, that only 16% of those performing surgeries had any kind of medical background.  She also pointed out the familiar details such as no sterilization, no antibiotics, no anesthesia, no sophisticated medical equipment complete with stunning, almost cartoonish, drawings.  She writes truth.

This afternoon I checked some numbers in Glenna Schroeder-Lein's Encyclopedia of Civil War Medicine to confirm hunches I have about survival rates.  She claims that of the estimated 620,000 deaths during the CW, approximately 2/3 are estimated to be victims of disease, either post-wound or totally unrelated to any wound.  When one thinks about the long-term physical and mental effect of the kind of warfare that took place during those horrific years between 1861 and 1865, one can only wonder how many real victims in the broadest sense of the word.

The power of the Stones River Museum, telling the story of that very short battle (December 31 - January 2) never ceases to amaze me.  Talking with a man yesterday whose great-great-grandfather had been wounded during the first encounters early in the morning of December 29, we were able to identify the approximate area where he had been wounded.  As we moved from the battle map to a real-time map of Murfreesboro and he saw the general location, he fell silent and just looked at the map.  After a few seconds he swallowed hard and simply declared, "Thank you.  That is really something."