The Civil War was the bloodiest conflict in American history, and although many were uncomfortable with the idea of women interacting with soldiers, there simply weren't enough male doctors to meet the needs of the wounded. Women in both the Union and the Confederacy helped fill that need, and in the doing so, changed the course of American medical history. This book tells the story of many of these brave women, including Dorothea Dix, an advocate for the mentally ill and the superintendent of army nurses for the Union, and Clara Barton, a self-taught nurse who founded the Red Cross.
In their efforts to utilize their medical skills and training in the service of their country, women physicians fought not one but two male-dominated professional hierarchies: the medical and the military establishments. In the process, they also contended with powerful social pressures and constraints. Throughout Women Doctors in War, the authors focus on the medical careers, aspirations, and struggles of individual women, using personal stories to illustrate the unique professional and personal challenges female military physicians have faced. Military and medical historians and scholars in women’s studies will discover a wealth of new information in Women Doctors in War.
Women in the medical field provided comfort and sanity during the blood and horror on the battlefields. In this new book, students will learn about these extraordinary doctors and nurses such as Dorothea Dix, the Union armys Superintendent of Female Nurses; Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell, the first female doctor of modern times; and Clara Barton, a nurse who later founded the American Red Cross. While lives were being lost on the front, these women helped save many.
Profiles American women who served as doctors and nurses in the Civil War, including Clara Barton, Mary Ann Bickerdyke, Dorothea Dix, Dr. Esther Hill Hawks, and Dr. Mary Edwards Walker.
As many as 20,000 women worked in Union and Confederate hospitals during America's bloodiest war. Black and white, and from various social classes, these women served as nurses, administrators, matrons, seamstresses, cooks, laundresses, and custodial workers. Jane E. Schultz provides the first full history of these female relief workers, showing how the domestic and military arenas merged in Civil War America, blurring the line between homefront and battlefront. Schultz uses government records, private manuscripts, and published sources by and about women hospital workers, some of whom are familiar--such as Dorothea Dix, Clara Barton, Louisa May Alcott, and Sojourner Truth--but most of whom are not well-known. Examining the lives and legacies of these women, Schultz considers who they were, how they became involved in wartime hospital work, how they adjusted to it, and how they challenged it. She demonstrates that class, race, and gender roles linked female workers with soldiers, both black and white, but became sites of conflict between the women and doctors and even among themselves. Schultz also explores the women's postwar lives--their professional and domestic choices, their pursuit of pensions, and their memorials to the war in published narratives. Surprisingly few parlayed their war experience into postwar medical work, and their extremely varied postwar experiences, Schultz argues, defy any simple narrative of pre-professionalism, triumphalism, or conciliation.
Nearly blind from an accident in childhood, deaf from complications of scarlet fever, and perpetually suffering from an ankle injury, Emily Parsons nevertheless enrolled in nursing school at the outbreak of the American Civil War in 1861. Already 37, she never married and made the care of others her fearless purpose in life. Despite her handicaps, she was appointed head of nursing on a large riverboat at Vicksburg during the siege of that city. She was stricken with malaria and sent to New York to recover. Upon recovery, she later headed nursing at the 2,500-bed Benton Barracks Hospital in St. Louis. Her abilities and tenderness with soldiers was remarked upon by many. In this wonderful collection of her letters to family (with an introduction by her father), you'll come to know this remarkable woman. Available for the first time as an affordable, well-formatted book for e-readers, Emily Elizabeth Parson's great service to others deserves to be read by a new, modern, and wider audience. Emily Elizabeth Parsons (March 8, 1824 --.May 19, 1880) Be sure to LOOK INSIDE or download a sample.
A look at the lives of the real nurses depicted in the PBS show Mercy Street. Heroines of Mercy Street tells the true stories of the nurses at Mansion House, the Alexandria, Virginia, mansion turned war-time hospital and setting for the PBS drama Mercy Street. Among the Union soldiers, doctors, wounded men from both sides, freed slaves, politicians, speculators, and spies who passed through the hospital in the crossroads of the Civil War, were nurses who gave their time freely and willingly to save lives and aid the wounded. These women saw casualties on a scale Americans had never seen before, and medicine was at a turning point. Heroines of Mercy Street follows the lives of women like Dorothea Dix, Mary Phinney, Anne Reading, and more before, during, and after their epic struggle in Alexandria and reveals their personal contributions to this astounding period in the advancement of medicine.
