Cincinnati's Sister Anthony O'Connell: "Angel" of the Civil War Battlefield

By Howard Wilkinson, 2-26-15

Throughout the Civil War, on the bloody battlefields and in the hospitals overflowing with the wounded, many a mortally wounded young soldier left this life looking into the kindly face of a nun from Cincinnati.

“Lord have mercy on his soul,’’ were the last words he heard, and a promise from the woman dressed in black that she would tell his mother that he died bravely.

She was Sister Anthony O’Connell, known throughout the Union Army as “the Angel of the Battlefield.”

With Sister Anthony as their leader, 42 nuns of the Sisters of Charity of Cincinnati left their peaceful home at Cedar Grove in Price Hill, where Elder and Seton high schools now stand, to travel the country, from Tennessee to Maryland, to treat the wounded and comfort the dying.

Today, next to the Sisters of Charity Motherhouse in Delhi Township, they rest in peace in the religious order’s cemetery, high atop a hill overlooking the Ohio River. You can pick out their grave sites because they are marked not only by the headstone cross but a second marker – one that says “U.S. Army Nurse.”

“They were better trained than any other nurses in the Civil War,’’ said Sister Judith Metz, the archivist of the Sisters of Charity. “This was a time when many believed that women were not fit to be nurses, not capable of doing the job.”

But Sister Anthony was the director of nursing at St. John’s Hospital in Cincinnati, which was run by the order and later became Good Samaritan Hospital. All of the sisters were trained in medicine by the doctors there.

The Civil War mission of Sister Anthony  began in May 1861, about a month after the war started.  At Camp Dennison in northeast Hamilton County, about 12,000 recruits were training for service in the Union Army. A measles epidemic had broken out in the camp; and men were dying in large numbers.

Archbishop John Purcell and George Hatch, then the mayor of Cincinnati, went to Sister Anthony and asked if a group of sisters could go to Camp Dennison to tend to the sick.

Sister Anthony said they would; and about half of the sisters of the order volunteered to go, taking the railroad line along the Little Miami River to the camp.

From Camp Dennison, the Sisters of Charity of Cincinnati traveled with the Army throughout the war, from Tennessee to Maryland, treating and comforting wounded soldiers on battlefields and in hospitals behind the lines.

And their work was not limited to wounded Union soldiers. They treated many Confederates as well, especially those who had been taken prisoner.

“Most of these young soldiers were Protestants, from small towns and farms, and many of them had never seen a nun before,’’ Sister Judith Metz said. “They weren’t comfortable with it at first. They called them ‘Holy Marias’ and a whole lot of other names. But it didn’t take long for the kindness and compassion of the sisters to win them over.”

That was evident in the diary of one Union soldier who was treated by Sister Anthony on a hospital ship anchored on the Tennessee River during the bloody battle of Shiloh in April 1862.

“Amid this sea of blood, she performed the most revolting duties for those poor soldiers,’’ he wrote. “She seemed like a ministering angel and many a young soldier owes his life to her care and charity.”

Sister Anthony, Sister Judith Metz said, “was a natural born leader.”

She was born Mary O'Connell in Limerick, Ireland in 1814, migrating to Massachusetts with her family as a young girl.

At the age of 21, she became a nun, joining the Sisters of Charity founded by St. Elizabeth Seton in Emmitsburg, Maryland.

Two years later, the order sent her to Cincinnati to open an orphanage and she ended up as the head of nursing at St. John’s Hospital, which was located at Third and Plum streets downtown.

In the spring of 1862, Sister Anthony and a group of Sisters of Charity boarded a hospital ship in Cincinnati and made the long journey to Pittsburg Landing on the Tennessee River. There, just beyond the river bank, the battle of Shiloh was raging. News reports of the carnage at Shiloh was the event that convinced most Americans, both North and South, that this war was going to be a long and bloody war.

Sister Anthony wrote in her diary of the horrors of the battle.

“At Shiloh, we ministered to the men on what were popularly known as floating hospitals,’’ Sister Anthony wrote. “We were often obliged to move further up the river, being unable to bear the stench from the bodies of the dead on the battlefield.”

She wrote, too, of “one poor fellow, whose nose had been completely shot off, and was nearly missed by the stretcher bearers. When found, the young soldier was placed in a hog pen, the only place of shelter and repose remaining.

“Before he could be brought to the boat, he had lost blood enough one would think to cause death; his clothes were saturated and the blood even reached his boots,’’ she wrote.

He became one of hundreds of wounded soldiers brought back to Cincinnati and treated at the Burnet House, a luxury hotel converted temporarily into a hospital, and other area hospitals.

Sister Anthony returned with them, working at the Burnet House. One day, she said, an “old gentleman” came to the hospital, saying he had heard his son might be there.

She walked him through the wards, without finding his son, when it occurred to her that the boy with the missing nose might be his son. The father could not recognize the boy because of the disfigurement of his face, but he looked at the soldier's hands and found a scar between his fingers that he recognized.

“Soon, father and son were locked in a fond embrace,’’ Sister Anthony wrote. “He took his darling back with him to his home.”

Sister Anthony and the other Sisters of Charity moved from place to place during the war – working in hospitals in Cumberland, Md.; Nashville, and Richmond, Ky. After the Richmond battle in August 1862, a Union defeat, 40 horse-drawn ambulances were sent to the Kentucky battlefield from Cincinnati, along with six Sisters of Charity. They treated wounded soldiers in the field; and brought hundreds back to Cincinnati to receive care.

Sister Anthony and the Sisters of Charity had good relations with the Union leadership, who needed all the help they could get with a strained Army medical corps that depended largely on volunteer nurses, often the wives of soldiers. In all, over 600 nuns from a multitude of religious orders served as nurses during the war.

“The sisters were highly regarded because they did not have to be taught,’’ Sister Judith Metz said. “They had skills that few of the other nurses had.”

At Nashville, when Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman visited the hospital where the Sisters of Charity were working, he joked with the soldiers about the black-clad women who were treating them.

Sister Mary Ann McCann, in her 1917 book, “The History of Mother Seton’s Daughters,’’ quoted Sherman as saying, “Come on, boys. You are only foxing (faking) it to get all the good things that these kind sisters prepare for you.”

At the end of the war in 1865, Sister Anthony and the other sisters returned to the order, which moved its Motherhouse to Delhi Township in the 1880s.

Sister Anthony went on serving after the war, tending to the poor and sick at Good Samaritan Hospital and the St. Joseph Infant and Maternity Home. She died on Dec. 8, 1897 – her 83rd birthday.

Archbishop William Elder asked that her funeral be held at St. Peter in Chains Cathedral downtown; and every seat was taken, with hundreds unable to get inside, standing on the cathedral steps. Many of the mourners wore the emblem of the Grand Army of the Republic – the organization of Union veterans of the Civil War.

Today, at the Motherhouse, her belongings are cherished by the sisters – the battered medical kit she carried throughout the war, along with her eyeglasses, her rosary, a small pair of scissors and a pocket knife.

“The fact that these things survived and are preserved tells you something,’’ Sister Judith Metz said. “It is a testimony to how highly she was thought of. And always will be.”

Image: "Angel of the Battlefield" painting which hangs in the Sisters of Charity's Motherhouse

From: wvxu.org

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Ill and Injured Children on Antebellum Slave Plantations: A Dangerous Childhood

By Marie Jenkins Schwartz

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Childhood was the least healthy stage of a slave’s life (Steckel 449). Prone to accident and disease, many children never lived to adulthood. Planter Martin W. Philips became so inured to high rates of childhood morbidity on his Mississippi plantation that he did not even bother to tally the number who died in the farm journal he used to keep track of daily events. When the adult slave Jane died in 1859, he noted that her death had brought to five the number “grown negroes” who had passed away since the plantation’s establishment in 1840. There was “no telling the number of younger ones,” he added (Philips 463). Of the five children born in bondage to Edna and Bob Jones in North Carolina, only one son—Hyacinth—lived long enough to be given a name, and even he died in infancy (Rawick ser. 2, vol. 15, pt.2: 25).

High rates of mortality, morbidity, and injury among enslaved children worried antebellum slaveholders because it threatened the Southern way of life. The United States had ended its participation in the international slave trade as of 1808, and slaveholders knew that slavery could remain profitable for future generations only if enough enslaved children survived to replace older slaves who died each year. Moreover, high rates of sickness and death suggested failure on the part of owners to care adequately for the youngsters, which encouraged a growing number of people, particularly in the North, to call for its end. Sentimental notions about childhood were gaining ground throughout the nation, which placed pressure on slaveholders to show concern for the enslaved youngsters living in their midst. The human quality that causes a person to empathize with someone who is suffering further motivated planters to worry about the children’s health. Slaveholders cultivated an image of themselves as paternalistic stewards of slaves. High rates of death, [End Page 56] disease, and injury called into question the ability of an owner to live up to this ideal. In more practical and immediate terms, neglect of children roiled relations with adult slaves rendering them less willing to cooperate in the workplace. Yet slaveholders proved reluctant to take steps that might have given enslaved children a better chance of survival.

Simply put, slaveholder desire to care for children was tempered by a desire for profit. To deflect criticism for the children’s poor health, they employed negative stereotyping of parents and other child caregivers and pointed to their own supposed benevolence. Rather than be horrified by what was happening to individual girls and boys, owners congratulated themselves on demographic trends that showed the enslaved population to be increasing. They considered home care—not professional care—the best approach to children’s health: indeed they had few medical allies in caring for enslaved children. They lauded whatever attention white mistresses gave to the children as superior to the care and nurture provided by enslaved parents, particularly mothers. They delegated nursing and childcare duties to black nurses, whom they said performed poorly. And they refused to acknowledge their own role in creating conditions that put children at risk for illness and injury and even death.

Slave owners took more interest in the overall birth and survival rate of slaves than in the fate of individual boys and girls. As long as the birthrate remained high enough and the death rate low enough to replenish a plantation’s slave population, planters considered the health status of enslaved children and adults acceptable. George Noble Jones refused to heed a warning that harsh punishments by one of his overseers were damaging his slaves’ health because he was satisfied with “their natural increase which in the last year has been over ten percent, in a gang of 120” (Phillips and Glunt 124). As long as planters could tally more births than deaths in their farm journals, they were satisfied.
Physicians in the era took little professional interest in childhood ailments, which meant they were not strong allies in the fight against childhood mortality and morbidity. Doctors were eager to treat slaves at the behest of owners: the...

From: The Southern Quarterly, Volume 53, Numbers 3/4, Spring/Summer 2016, pp. 56-69

From: muse.jhu.edu

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Nation’s Needs Spark a Health Care Ministry

From: cscsisters.org

Six months after the outbreak of the U.S. Civil War in 1861, the Sisters of the Holy Cross responded to the request of Governor Oliver P. Morton of Indiana who asked the congregation if it could spare sisters to care for the Indiana soldiers then serving in Kentucky. Although they had no training as nurses, six Holy Cross sisters, led by Mother M. Angela (Eliza Gillespie), volunteered to journey to Paducah, Kentucky, to tend the sick and the wounded. Many more sisters followed. Simon Cameron, President Abraham Lincoln’s Secretary of War, asked them to take over the nursing at a government hospital in Louisville, Kentucky; others went to hospitals in Illinois, Tennessee, Missouri and Washington, D.C.

On Christmas Eve 1862, three Holy Cross sisters boarded the U.S. Navy’s first hospital ship, the Red Rover, to serve as nurses for the wounded on both sides of the Civil War. They traveled the Mississippi River carrying sick and wounded soldiers to various military hospitals. In so doing they became what U.S. naval history today hails as the forerunners of the United States Navy Nurse Corps. Before the conflict ended, 65 of the 160 Sisters of the Holy Cross in the United States would serve in the Civil War, and another 13 sisters would serve in the Spanish-American War.

In the decades that followed, Holy Cross sisters continued to respond to the unmet health needs of people across the developing frontier by establishing 19 hospitals over 133 years, serving as administrators, nurses and chaplains. In 1979 the congregation brought together its remaining eight congregation-sponsored hospitals to form Holy Cross Health System. In 2000 this health system consolidated resources with Mercy Health Services to create Trinity Health. Sponsored by Catholic Health Ministries, Trinity Health is one of the largest Catholic health care systems in the United States.

Today, Holy Cross sisters continue to minister in a variety of health care settings worldwide.

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An Overview of US Navy Hospital Ships (excerpt)

By LCDR Tom Burden, MSC, USN (Ret.), Surgeon General, Naval Order of the United States, 8-28-16

Part 1: Tripoli to The Spanish American War

Almost as long as there have been wars fought on or near waters there have been vessels used to care for casualties. Ancient history tells how the Romans used special boats to remove the sick and wounded. The United States, as did other countries with navies, also found a use for such ships.

During the Tripoli piracy era of 1803 and 1804, Commodore Preble designated the captured ketch Intrepid as a ship with hospital duties. Intrepid is better known, however as the ship that sneaked under the eyes of the enemy and blew up the Philadelphia held captive by the Tripolitans.

In 1859, the threat of yellow fever, an epidemic brought on by seamen returning from foreign ports, led to the first floating hospital in America. The infected sailors were turned away by the New York marine hospital, and it was necessary to find a place to treat them. A local physician, Dr. William Adison, recently returned from England where he had studied in the floating hospital ship Caledonian, suggested a similar vessel. After his idea was accepted, the port authorities voted funds to purchase the steamer Falcon. Her engines were removed, the deck was housed over, and other necessary facilities were installed. Fittingly enough the name was changed to the Florence Nightingale, and a number of patients were cared for aboard her.

USS Red Rover

During the Civil War, a captured side-wheel steamer named by its Confederate owner the Red Rover, proved to be the U.S. Navy's first hospital ship. This steamer was used originally as living quarters for the men manning the Confederate States' Floating Battery New Orleans. When New Orleans was bombarded by the Union’s Western Gunboat Flotilla in March 1862, the Red Rover was hit by a shell that pierced her top and slanted through all her decks to the bottom. Although she leaked considerably, the ship was in no danger of sinking. She was captured by the Union gunboat Mound City and almost immediately prepared as a floating hospital for the casualties of the North. Not long after her capture, the Red Rover became a haven for many injured men and officers of the apprehending gunboat. That summer, the ship was renovated by the Army Quartermaster Corps to include laundries, bathroom facilities, elevators to upper decks, operating rooms, nine water closets, separate kitchens for crew and patients, and gauze blinds to keep out smoke and cinders from the convalescents' berth deck. Enough stores were taken aboard for a crew and 200 patients for three months. This included 300 tons of ice. Commander Captain Alexander M. Pennock reported to his Flag officer, "The boat is supplied with everything necessary for the restoration of health for the disabled seamen."

On 11 June 1862, she received her first patient, a seaman from the gunboat Benton, a victim of cholera. At this time the Red Rover was really "half Army and half Navy," and it was only after the Illinois Prize Board sold her to the Navy that she could be called a Navy hospital ship. The reorganization and transfer of the Western Flotilla to the Navy helped to solidify this fact. She was commissioned in the Navy the day after Christmas, 1862.

The first vessel thus designated as a Navy hospital ship had a crew of twelve officers and thirty-five men, exclusive of the thirty surgeons and nurses aboard.  Not all of the nurses aboard were male. Four sisters of the Order of the Holy Cross came aboard that Christmas eve and were joined later by several other sisters and some black female nurses.

Unknowingly, this small group proved to be the pioneers of a Navy Nurse Corps which would be organized some fifty years later. Not only was this fledgling hospital ship kept busy with her patients, but she was also pressed into service as a store ship carrying medical supplies, ice, and provisions to the ships of the river fleet. With the establishment of a naval hospital at Memphis, Red Rover, was relieved of some of her duties. As the war between the states drew to a close, so did the need for the Red Rover and she was removed from the service 1 November 1865 and later sold at public auction.

From: navalorder.org

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U.S. Military Builds on Rich History of Amputee Care

From: amputee-coalition.org

DURING EVERY MAJOR CONFLICT, COMBAT INJURIES HAVE CAUSED LARGE NUMBERS OF SERVICE MEMBERS TO LOSE ONE OR MORE OF THEIR LIMBS; IN FACT, THESE INDIVIDUALS ARE ONE OF THE MOST VISIBLE AND ENDURING REMINDERS OF THE COST OF WAR.

During the Civil War, for example, approximately 21,000 major amputations occurred in the Union Army alone. Fortunately, since that time, there have been advances in medicine, prosthetics, and technology that have helped make it more possible for today’s war amputees to regain their independence and return to “normal” lives.

War Amputees in the Past

During World War I, there were 2,635 major amputations among American soldiers. By the time the United States became involved in World War II, the treatment of choice had become the open circular technique in which the wound was left open at the time of the initial surgery and the residual limb was placed in s09/07/2006ection in the postoperative period that occurred when the wound was prematurely closed. Soldiers were then transported to the United States from France and placed at amputee centers for wound healing, therapy and prosthetic fitting. In these centers, the resources of surgeons, prosthetists, nurses and therapists were consolidated and patients were treated by a team to provide consistent and comprehensive treatment. In fact, “the team approach,” commonly used today in the care of amputees, originated at this time. Lowerextremity amputees were fitted for a temporary prosthesis and allowed to ambulate.

There were about 15,000, U.S. Army amputees during World War II, and the early establishment of clinical policies by Major General N.T. Kirk, based on his experience during World War I, allowed for the best care of amputees during that war. In addition, Kirk helped establish amputee centers around the country to provide the specialized care that these individuals needed during World War I. In fact, during World War II, the U.S. Army established seven amputation centers, each with the capability to provide up-to-date surgical, medical, prosthetic and rehabilitative care.

Other significant advances were also made around this time. The National Research Council sponsored research on improving prosthetic devices. For lower-extremity amputees, basic gait was studied at the University of California in Berkeley to determine the parameters of normal gait to improve prosthetic function. The field of upper-extremity prosthetics was progressed/ advanced by a variety of companies, including Northrop Aircraft Corporation, in an effort to improve amputees’ ability to perform activities of daily living.

During the Korean War, improvements in resuscitation of severely injured patients, including amputees, reduced the mortality rate. Additionally, for the first time, it became practical to repair blood vessels injured in battle, reducing the amputation rate of blood vessel injuries from about 50 percent during World War II to about 10 percent when the vessels were repaired promptly.

By 1968, the number of amputees in military hospitals was growing because of the increased involvement of the United States in the Vietnam War. Amputees were cared for at Brooke Army General Hospital, Fitzsimmons Army General Hospital, Walter Reed General Hospital, Valley Forge Army General Hospital, and the U.S. Naval Hospitals in Oakland and Philadelphia.

The safety of leaving the residual limb open after amputation until patients were at a site of definitive care in the United States was reconfirmed by the high rate of complications seen with patients who had their wounds closed in Vie09/07/2006y ambulation of patients with lower-extremity amputations also appeared to be beneficial because it led to reduced swelling of the amputation wound, earlier independence, an improved psychological outlook, and the development of a faster proprioceptive sense.

War Amputees Today

Today, thousands of amputees continue to need specialized care as a result of their military service during conflicts such as those in Vietnam and more recently in southwest Asia. Providing this care remains a major challenge for the Armed Services during wartime and afterward as military amputees reenter the Service or return to civilian life and need long-term or lifelong support.

In general, lower-extremity amputations occur more frequently than upper-extremity amputations, and because of the nature of military operations, traumatic amputations due to blast, motor vehicle, and other injuries are more common among military Service members than their civilian counterparts. While civilian amputees are more likely to be older with one or more health problems, military amputees, like the military population in general, are typically young and healthy adults.

Traumatic military injuries are often different from injuries sustained in civilian life. The explosive force of modern munitions causes more tissue destruction than occurs in civilian injuries or occurred in military injuries in the past. At the same time, more war casualties survive these devastating injuries today largely because of advances in body armor, quicker access to advanced life support and effective technological care in the field, and our ability to more quickly transfer the injured over long distances to highly capable medical treatment facilities.

To prevent infection and preserve limb length, special surgical and medical techniques are required to manage blast-related wounds, which are often dirty and large. Sometimes, fragments from the blast itself may impair other soft tissue structures such as muscles and nerves, which can affect the overall rehabilitation and function of the new amputee. Frequently, the same blast that resulted in amputation can also result in a traumatic brain injury or concussion that can affect the service member’s personality, memory, or thinking. In addition, for months and perhaps years into the future, military Service members who are new traumatic amputees and their significant others will likely require a support network to help them adjust emotionally.

Out of necessity, the U.S. military has developed a rich tradition of addressing the special care needs of traumatic military amputees, and this tradition of readiness and leadership continues today.

Addressing the Needs of War Amputees

The vision of the Congress-supported U.S. Army Amputee Patient Care Program, which was established in December 2001, is to provide optimal, individualized care for active-duty amputees to maximize their physical, psychological, and emotional function. To accomplish these goals, the Program draws upon the best from both military and civilian experts in amputee care, and initiatives are under way to promote further advances in prosthetic technology. And since amputee care is lifelong care, there is also strong cooperation between the Department of Defense and the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA).

Today, the military continues to offer state-of-the-art amputee care and to help wounded service members regain their independence. Thanks to the high level of medical, prosthetic and technological care available in the military healthcare system, most of these young men and women will go on to live full and productive civilian lives or return to military duty if they so desire. We’ve made it our duty to provide them with every opportunity for a promising future.

In summary, the U.S. Army Amputee Patient Care Program is dedicated to providing expert and timely multidisciplinary amputee care to enable new military amputees to reach their highest level of function. And for those who have the desire and ability to continue their military service, the program is dedicated to offering the support they need to attain their goals.

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this publication are those of the authors and are not necessarily those of the Amputee Coalition, the Department of the Army, the Army Medical Department, or any other agency of the US Government.

Image: Military man with upper-extremity amputation

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Sisters’ Nursing Ministry Begins With Civil War

By Sister Margaret Mary Lavonis

It should not surprise anyone who knows the mission of the Sisters of the Holy Cross — to discern the needs of the times and respond appropriately — that the congregation said yes to Indiana Governor Oliver P. Morton’s request to Father Edward Sorin to send sisters to care for the wounded troops then serving in Kentucky during the Civil War. His request came on October 21, 1861, six months after the war’s outbreak.

The next morning, Mother M. Angela Gillespie and six sisters (none of them trained as nurses) departed for Cairo at the southern tip of Illinois, 500 miles from Notre Dame, Indiana. There General Ulysses S. Grant assigned them to the military hospital in Paducah, Kentucky. Thus began the congregation’s ministry in health care.

Paducah was only the beginning. The sisters served so well in Paducah that Secretary of War Simon Cameron asked the congregation to take over the nursing at a government hospital in Louisville, Kentucky. And more sisters were sent to care for the wounded at a newly opened hospital in Mound City, Illinois.

Hospital conditions

The conditions in all of these hospitals, often quickly converted warehouses or factories, were deplorable. They were unsanitary which caused outbreaks of typhoid, smallpox and other diseases that not only affected the wounded but also family members and the medical personnel. The sisters addressed these problems the best they could.

Sister M. Paula Casey describes her first visit to a military hospital in Cairo in December 1861 as a fearful experience: “Every room on the first floor was strewn with human legs and arms. As the wounded were brought in from the battlefield, they were laid anywhere, and amputations took place. Some of the wards resembled a slaughter house, the walls were so splattered with blood.”

After a tour of the hospital given by William Burke, the doctor in charge, Sister Paula and companions Sister M. Augusta Anderson and Sister M. Isidore Conlin immediately pinned up their habits and wept and scrubbed the hospital wards until they were clean. Actions such as this helped to alleviate the fear the soldiers and the sailors had of military hospitals.

The living quarters of the sisters were primitive at best. Sister M. Callista Pointan describes the conditions upon moving into the hospital at Mound City, Illinois, in 1861: “We found a very miserable barracks of a place, an unfinished warehouse without even the common necessities of life. One bed and one chair had to do service for five sisters. Mother Angela and I slept on a table on some clothes which had been sent to be washed.”

First hospital ship

In June 1862 several sisters were asked to serve as nurses aboard the USS Red Rover, the first Navy hospital ship that went up and down the Mississippi River carrying the sick and wounded of both the North and the South to the various military hospitals. In so doing they became what U.S. naval history today hails as the pioneers or forerunners of the U.S. Navy Nurse Corps. They also were the Navy’s first paid women employees, with historical records showing that Sisters Callista, Sister M. Veronica Scholl, and Sister M. Adela Moran earned two dollars a day.

Sister Adela reflects upon her experience: “In company with two or three other sisters I was sent on board the Hospital boat called the Red Rover, which carried the sick and wounded to the hospitals. I never left the boat till the close of the war. We were near Vicksburg when it was taken, could hear the firing, and see the boats running the blockade.”

Work in other hospitals

In addition to serving on the Red Rover and the hospitals in Illinois and Kentucky, the sisters staffed hospitals in Tennessee, Missouri and Washington, D.C. As the number of hospitals confided to their care by the federal government increased, more and more sisters were sent to serve. Before the war ended, 65 of the 160 Sisters of the Holy Cross in the United States would serve as nurses in the western theater of the war and in the nation’s capital.

Each sister nurse also received a military pension, which helped pay for Bertrand Hall, now the congregation’s administration building at Saint Mary’s, Notre Dame, Indiana. The Navy has honored these sisters with a special headstone placed on their graves in the congregation’s Our Lady of Peace Cemetery at Saint Mary’s.

The Sisters of the Holy Cross are among 12 congregations of religious women who are depicted on the Nuns of the Battlefield monument, erected in 1924 in Washington, D.C. The inscription reads: “To the memory and in honor of the various orders of sisters who gave their services as nurses on the battlefields and in hospitals during the Civil War. They comforted the dying, nursed the wounded, carried hope to the imprisoned, gave in His name a drink of water to the thirsty.”

From: cscsisters.org

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This Place of Death: Environment as Weapon in the American Civil War

By Margaret Humphreys

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Environment was central to the understanding of disease causation in the American Civil War. Physicians of that war, north and south, viewed the environment as the key factor in health and disease, and one that could often be manipulated. Pre-war discussions of urban epidemics had focused on meteorology and environmental filth. The increased prevalence of malaria and yellow fever in the more Southern states, for example, was explained by variations in temperature and humidity. The built environment of hospitals and prison camps, designed with an eye to ventilation, hygiene, and crowding, was similarly seen as crucial to health, either in causing disease or creating a setting conducive to recovery. The agency of place in generating disease contributed to wartime rhetoric about the ways in which geography would support one side over the other, or how the manipulation of the built environment had been done deliberately to engender disease.

This article will first sketch the pre-war understanding of environmental factors in disease etiology, including the expected improvement to health that a cleansed environment should bring. It will likewise present ideas of seasoning as an experience of the Southerner who had gained protection from the tropical influences of his home country, protection the Yankee invader would lack. My attention then turns to the Civil War camp as a de novo urban [End Page 12] space which required hygienic discipline to decrease crowd diseases. The application of this knowledge applied equally to camp, hospital, and prison, albeit with varying success in the multiple loci of Civil War occupation. The Southern belief in the power of its indigenous diseases—yellow fever and malaria—to defend their turf will be explored, and the ultimate failure of this plan explicated. Finally, the claims that prison camps spread disease and death by design, and particular suspicions about smallpox as a deliberate weapon, will be explored against the larger backdrop of ethical and humanitarian challenges of the prison camp narrative.

The Environmental Understanding of Disease Causation
The mid-nineteenth century found medical thinkers in Europe and America engrossed in arguments about contagion, disease causation, and disease prevention. The clarity offered by the germ theory—that microbe A causes disease A, and travels from person to person through air, water or insect vector—would not emerge until the late nineteenth century. Instead, observers struggled to explain the relationship of disease outbreaks to climate, contact with diseased sites via travel, and local causes within the urban or rural environment (Steiner).

One disease set the model for the concept of contagion—smallpox. While uncertain about what actually passed from person to person, physicians had clear evidence that smallpox resulted from contact with an infected case, or with that person’s clothing or blankets. Furthermore, the cause of smallpox could be scraped from one arm, dried, stored in an envelope, carried to a distant place, and inoculated into the arm of a new patient, who would then come down with the disease. This practice, dubbed inoculation, produced a genuine case of smallpox, albeit one with attenuated virulence and lowered mortality risk compared to naturally acquired disease. It was applied during the Boston smallpox outbreak of 1721. In the 1790s English physician Edward Jenner discovered that lesions of cowpox could likewise cause a smallpox-like disease, but with even lower risk of a bad outcome. From this recognition the practice of vaccination became common, and by the mid-nineteenth century vaccination was frequent in American cities. Other diseases such as measles and chickenpox also appeared to follow this contagious pattern, although vaccines against them would not be developed until the twentieth century. Here is the model of contagion, then: a susceptible person enters a room with a sick patient, breathes the air around her, and becomes sick (Fenn, Pox Americana; Willrich; Grob).

The other major epidemic diseases of the day, cholera and yellow fever, did not follow this pattern. Modern biomedicine knows that cholera is caused [End Page 13] by an intestinal pathogen that is spread through fecally-contaminated water (and sometimes food). Yellow fever is the result of a virus transmitted by mosquitoes. One could...

From: The Southern Quarterly, Volume 53, Numbers 3/4, Spring/Summer 2016

From: muse.jhu.edu

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Civil War Surgery

By Dawn Brezina, MD, 9-1-06

Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson and a small group of men rode at dusk along the still-steaming battlefield perimeter on May 2, 1863. During daylight the Confederates had won a stunning victory at Chancellorsville, Va. Despite marked manpower and hardware inferiority, the leadership of Generals Robert Lee and Stonewall Jackson sent Union General “Fighting” Joe Hooker literally running from the battlefield. Jackson’s evening patrol was to ensure stability and set his plan for the next day.

Encountering other Confederate soldiers on the path in the waning light, the Jackson patrol exchanged words with the men, but the North Carolina contingent of soldiers did not believe the approaching mounted men were Confederate, so they fired into their midst. General Jackson fell, having suffered two gunshot wounds. The large caliber (.58), soft-lead minie ball was heavy, and it expanded when it went through tissue, resulting in shattered bone and tearing of internal soft tissues. Minie ball injuries to an arm or a leg usually meant amputation, and torso or head wounds were most often fatal.

Friendly fire was the source of General Jackson’s mortal upper-arm wound. He was attended by the 27-year-old surgeon, Doctor Hunter McGuire, medical director of the left wing of the Army of Northern Virginia, under General Jackson’s command. Jackson had sustained a minor wound to his right hand and a severe, heavily bleeding wound to his left upper arm. Dr. McGuire amputated the left arm about two inches below the shoulder, administering chloroform anesthesia. Post-operatively, Dr. McGuire diagnosed his patient with pneumonia. Jackson remained ill and died a week later from, presumably, pneumonia. Interestingly, some historians wonder if he actually died of a pulmonary embolus because he had been in bed rest for a week and died of a respiratory event. Either way, he succumbed to complications of his initial injury.

Civil War-era surgery was a gruesome event; it is remarkable that so many of the soldiers actually survived the ordeal. Anesthesia was administered by placing a handkerchief over the nose and mouth and dropping chloroform on the cloth until the patient was unconscious. The surgeon then had about 10-15 minutes to accomplish the surgery with the patient asleep. The most common Civil War surgery was the amputation of an extremity and this was usually accomplished in about 10 minutes. First-person reports and photographic documentation confirm the mounds of discarded limbs outside Civil War field hospitals. It is interesting to note that the use of anesthesia without a protected airway—as in the case of Stonewall Jackson—was the likely etiology of his post-operative (aspiration) pneumonia.

Although the English surgeon Joseph Lister was on his way to setting the standard for antiseptic surgery, this concept did not make its way to the United States until after the 1860s. The Civil War ended in 1865. During the Civil War, surgical instruments were rinsed during and between cases in a tub of increasingly bloody cold water. The surgeon made his way from patient to patient in pus- and blood-splattered garments; it is little wonder that fever was a common and dreaded post-operative event. Surgical fever was often the result of pyemia, (literally pus in the blood), which presumably was the same diagnosis as sepsis. Other deadly complications included erysipelas, osteomyelitis, gangrene, tetanus, and pneumonia. Physicians had almost no way of treating penetrating torso injuries. Surgery was occasionally attempted, but usually fatal. Lacking any modality to localize the intra-abdominal or chest injury pre-operatively and realizing the need to complete the surgery in just minutes, torso surgery was usually not an option.

Those who survived their wounds—and their treatments—must have been a hardy lot. One wonders how many lives would have been saved with just a rudimentary understanding of aseptic technique. Today we face the same issues: amputation, post-operative pneumonia and pulmonary embolism, and wound infections. The problems of yesterday still remain the problems of today and tomorrow.

From: the-hospitalist.org

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