Civil War Nurse Narratives, 1863–1870 by Daneen Wardrop (review)

In this book, Daneen Wardrop examines the narratives of white women who served as Union army nurses during the Civil War. She focuses on seven individuals—Louisa May Alcott, Georgeanna Woolsey, Julia Dunlap, Elvira Powers, Anna Morris Holstein, Sophronia Bucklin, and Julia Wheelock—and she provides some biographical data on her subjects when it can be recovered. (Dunlap’s identity was verified only in 2010.) The nurses, who were mostly young, single women, came from a range of class backgrounds, and most of them seem to have been native-born Protestants. Many of them supported woman’s rights, in theory or in practice, and all of them appeared to support emancipation. They served in different locations, in northern cities, in the occupied South, and on the battlefield. They published their memoirs over a span of seven years, starting with Alcott’s Hospital Sketches in 1863 and ending with Wheelock’s The Boys in White: The Experience of a Hospital Agent in and around Washington in 1870.

These women performed a wide variety of duties, such as dressing wounds, bathing soldiers, and assisting at surgeries. Underpaid and overworked, they labored in makeshift hospitals set up in warehouses and churches. Because of the organizational problems in many hospitals, they performed yet more tasks, such as cooking and doing laundry. All of the narratives reveal their concern for the patients, especially when troops experienced mistreatment, neglect, or misdiagnosis. Several of these nurses treated blacks as well as whites, and they admired both groups of soldiers equally. In addition, the narratives convey the power struggles that sometimes broke out between doctors and nurses. Military surgeons ran the gamut in terms of skill and integrity, including dedicated professionals as well as shady characters who committed graft. Sophronia Bucklin witnessed a doctor’s campaign of sexual harassment against a nurse, one Mrs. Bolier, who had to leave her post because of his misconduct. The reader finishes the book with a deep appreciation of the nurses’ determined efforts to provide good care for their patients.

The memoirs also reveal some under-documented aspects of ethnicity and immigration in nineteenth-century America, including stories of Indians who served in the conflict. Elvira Powers, who worked in the North and the South, tried to help two Native American veterans who were returning to their homes in the North, the three of them communicating in sign language. We get brief, fascinating glimpses of other people caught up in the war. Julia Dunlap met an enlisted man, a Spanish immigrant whose full name is unknown, as he worried about his children left in the wartime equivalent of foster care in Philadelphia. Dunlap, who felt some compassion for the Spaniard, nevertheless insulted an Irish American woman, reminding us of the unpredictable nature of prejudice among white Americans from all regions.

Elvira Powers is one of the more perceptive women in the book. Little is known about her background except that she came from New England and attended the Universalist Church. She labored in the wartime South as a nurse, a teacher, and an assistant in a home for white southern refugees, all of it recounted in her book, Hospital Pencillings: Being a Diary while in Jefferson General Hospital, Jefferson, Ind., and Others at Nashville, Tennessee, as Matron and Visitor (1866). Gifted with acute powers of observation, she composed memorable descriptions of the natural world and the various human beings she encountered in her work. Powers sympathized with white southern civilians who contended with homelessness, hunger, physical sickness, and mental illness. Yet Wardrop does not provide any context from the scholarship on the wartime environment or on wartime refugees. The entire book would have benefited from a stronger context from the scholarship on the history of medicine.

The author, a professor of English, is primarily concerned with the “rhetorical tactics” and “narrative strategies” these nurses employed as they told their stories (5, 28). But their actual experiences, interesting in and of themselves, do not...