Heroines of Mercy Street

by Pamela D. Toler PhD

  Mary Phinney von Olnhausen Becomes a Hero

  Unlike most of her comrades-in-arms, Mary Phinney von Olnhausen’s career as an army nurse had an odd second act. She had barely recovered from the fatigues of her Civil War experience when she returned to the hard and monotonous duties of life on the Illinois prairie. During her absence, her brother’s wife had died, leaving him with five children, including an infant boy. For the next five years, von Olnhausen lived a hardscrabble life on his farm, taking care of children and homestead and worrying about the grinding uncertainties of weather, water, crops, and markets.

  In July 1870, Napoleon III declared war on Prussia. When news of the Franco-Prussian War reached the prairie some weeks later, von Olnhausen was overcome with the desire to once again volunteer as a nurse. Her official explanation was a combination of zeal for nursing and the wish to be of service to her husband’s countrymen. She may also have simply wanted to leave the prairie.

  Whatever her motivations, nursing on European battlefields was not an obvious choice. She spoke some French, but no German, and the Prussian army discouraged the participation of foreign nurses. She had no money and the German organizations in America could not support her. Von Olnhausen was not deterred. She begged and borrowed money from her friends, asked for recommendations from the doctors she had worked with, and began to study German. In October 1870, at the age of fifty-two, she set sail from Boston for Liverpool.

  She had never been out of the country before, but she made her way without difficulty to Berlin, practicing her German every chance she got. Fellow travelers on the ship to Liverpool assumed she was “some forlorn German Frau” because she made a point of speaking only to German passengers. She laughed at their mistake, sure that if any of them spoke German they would have known better. She knew that she was anything but fluent, but the only way to learn was to plunge in and blunder along.8

  In Berlin, she managed to get permission to go to the front, which was then not far from Paris, despite the fact that there were strict orders no civilians would be allowed to do so. She attributed her success to her status as an American and the letters of recommendation she carried from Rev. Bellows and others, but it is probable that being the Baroness von Olnhausen also helped. As she would later note when she met an incompetent German nurse, a red-faced, hard-drinking “Fraülein von somebody,” membership in the privileged class denoted by that “von” at the front of a name made it possible to keep a job—or gain permissions that plain Mrs. Olnhausen might not have received.9

  With her permissions in hand, she set out from Berlin on November 10. On the way to the front she lost her trunk, which contained her letters of recommendation, credentials, and all her extra clothing. (The trunk turned up in Nancy, France, four months later.) For several months she moved through German-occupied territory in search of a place where she could put her skills to use, passed along from one German official to another. At times she was thwarted by officials who would not approve her passage to the next hospital until they received specific instructions from higher authorities. She served for a short period with various ambulance units, only to be shoved aside by the arrival of German nurses. (In one letter she gives in to a moment of professional pique and complains: “The way they dress wounds is abominable; they are not even where we were in ’62.”10) At the hospital in Meung—run by the Knights of St. John, a nineteenth-century variation of the medieval Knights Hospitalers—the other nurses were so hostile that they did not tell her they were preparing to evacuate before the French took the city. Luckily the knight in charge of the hospital insisted on waiting for von Olnhausen to join them.

  Her letters from this period are once again “growlers.” She was horrified by the condition of German hospitals, which she thought were worse than the worst field hospitals in the most disorganized days of the Civil War. The beds were abominable, the patients were dirty, and the rooms had no ventilation at all. As far as she could see, the staff did nothing but eat and drink all day long. In one hospital the matron drank red wine right out of the bottle all through rounds; von Olnhausen claimed that had she drunk in such a way she “would have had to occupy one of the beds before the first half-hour.”11

  She was saddened by the destruction the war had caused: “beautiful villas entirely destroyed; furniture, pictures, glass, all broken in pieces; trees and shrubs torn up; marble statues all in ruins.”12 Any house that had not been destroyed was occupied as a hospital or government office.

  By early December she was thoroughly frustrated: “I can’t get up the least enthusiasm. In the first place, I haven’t enough to do, nor can I get it. I think there is one woman to every two wounded men—all with caps or some such costume, and calling one another ‘Sister.’”13 She briefly turned into a nineteenth-century ambulance chaser, following rumors of freshly wounded soldiers in need of help.

  In January 1871, von Olnhausen finally found her place at an army hospital in Vendôme, in the Loire valley. She worked there through the beginning of March, pleased with the doctors, the sisters, the town, the food, and most of all the work. Her French and German had improved to the point where she no longer needed a translator, so she was able to explore the town in her little free time.

  The German and French governments ratified a peace settlement on March 1, 1871, and German forces began to withdraw, taking their wounded with them. Von Olnhausen reconciled herself to leaving Vendôme with the army. On March 9, just as she was getting into the carriage, the chief doctor informed her they had received badly wounded men from another hospital, and he hoped she would care for them. He didn’t have to ask twice. She was delighted, not only by the compliment to her skills but by the opportunity to stay in France until the weather got warmer in Germany.

  With the new patients in her care, von Olnhausen worked from early morning until nine each night. The men had received no care at all as far as she could tell. They had lain in the wet for weeks, so they had horrible sores as well as the “indescribable wounds” that had put them in the hospital in the first place.14

  When the hospital corps prepared to leave Vendôme nine days later, several men were not strong enough to travel: three wounded, four with typhoid, and two with smallpox. Von Olnhausen volunteered to remain with them and to transport them to Berlin when they were well enough to move.

  It turned out to be more hazardous duty than she expected. The working classes in Paris rose in revolt the day before the hospital corps left Vendôme, in part over one of the terms of the peace settlement, which provided for the German army to march through the Arc de Triomphe. The mood in Vendôme was ugly. Children yelled “Prussian, Prussian” whenever von Olnhausen stepped outside. Her patients were afraid of what the French might do to them.

  The news from Paris grew worse every day. On March 24, she received a telegram saying they must leave the next morning. Two of her patients were too ill to travel, so she refused. One died soon after, leaving her with eight men in her care.

  On the evening of March 30, the mayor of Vendôme arrived with a dispatch from the German Sanitary Commission agent at Orléans saying they must evacuate immediately. The mayor too was eager for them to leave because of the bad sentiment in the city toward Prussians. Von Olnhausen reached the hospital at six and got the men to the diligence (the French equivalent of a stage coach) by eight. It was market day and the town was full of people. She was afraid things could get violent when some people shouted and ran after the coach, “but the drivers were real good, and we were soon out of their claws.”15

  Transportation and housing arrangements failed at every stage of the trip, forcing von Olnhausen to beg for help and borrow money to keep her small crew of invalids fed.

  When they reached Blois, they found they could not go on to Orléans, but must wait for three or four days. As far as von Olnhausen was concerned it was a relief. The men were already exhausted. The next morning she received another urgent dispatch: they had twenty minutes to get to the station. She scramb
led to get the men dressed and packed while someone found them a carriage and men to carry the stretchers. When they got to the station she found only an open pack wagon without even straw for bedding in place of the ambulance train she expected. Due to the confusion of their packing, von Olnhausen didn’t have enough blankets to cover all the men, so she removed her dress and skirt to use instead and “rode to Orléans without.”16

  At Orléans, she hired two armed guards on the advice of an official at the station. She was glad to have them when a crowd surrounded her charges while the men were transported on stretchers from the diligence station to the hospital: “They hooted and screamed, and one horrible old woman howled out all sorts of curses, kicked up the dust over us with her awful old wooden shoes and shook her head so that her gray hair fell over her face and shoulders… I could then understand what a revolution in France meant.”17

  The next morning the men were shuffled in and out of pack wagons at the Orléans station, waiting for an ambulance train they were assured would arrive at nine. Half a day passed with no train. The men were crying with cold and pain. The waiting room was full of French soldiers, who were vocal in their dislike of the Prussians. Von Olnhausen had just decided to take the men back to the hospital when the train finally arrived. Three doctors appeared at the station door and helped the men into the railroad cars, where they were fed and made comfortable. Von Olnhausen was given a bunk with the two Protestant Sisters who served as the ambulance’s nurses.

  They traveled with the train to Tours, where they picked up more patients, and then back to Vendôme, where the train had been scheduled to pick them up. They had been gone for a week; it felt like a month. The entire difficult and dangerous trip had been totally unnecessary, the result of panic on the part of the German Sanitary Commission agent.

  After two days in Vendôme, they set out with the ambulance train for Berlin, where they arrived on April 19, 1871.

  Two years later, von Olnhausen received an unexpected tribute for her courage in remaining behind with the Prussian soldiers. Kaiser Wilhelm I, the king of Prussia and newly elected emperor of Germany, presented her with the Iron Cross, the Prussian equivalent of the Medal of Honor.

  Von Olnhausen’s European nursing experience provided her with one last adventure at the end of her life. In March 1902, Prince Henry of Prussia, the brother of Kaiser Wilhelm II, visited Boston during a trip to the United States. Some German friends insisted von Olnhausen accompany them to a reception in his honor, and she decided to wear the Iron Cross for the occasion. She was so intimidated by the idea of meeting the prince that she just wanted it to be over, but Prince Henry noticed the decoration and broke away from the receiving line to speak to her. He shook her hand twice, “just as any other feller would.” She was so flustered that she forgot to bow or address him by his title. He spoke first in German, but it had been almost thirty years since she used the language. Seeing that she was struggling to understand him, he switched to English and asked about her experiences in the war.

  The newspapers dubbed von Olnhausen “the Little Madam of the Iron Cross,” and her story appeared in papers from Maine to California. Visitors, known and unknown, crowded her rooms at Grundmann Studios in Boston. Writing to a friend in North Carolina on March 10, von Olnhausen admitted to enjoying both the experience and the subsequent “fuss”: “Nothing like being the fad for a while. I’ve waited forty years, and now, when I’m so old it comes all at once.”18

  She died a month later, at the age of eighty-four.

  Clara Barton Continues to Serve

  Clara Barton, as founder of the American Red Cross, made the largest impact of any single Civil War nurse in the years after the war.

  The International Red Cross had been founded several years before. In 1863, while the United States was locked in its internal struggle, Swiss businessman Henry Dunant, who had witnessed the aftermath of the Battle of Solfierno in the Italian War of Independence several years before, called a conference of thirty-nine delegates from sixteen nations to Geneva to discuss questions of battlefield relief and humanitarian aid. The group met again in 1864 and created the set of recommendations that would become the Geneva Treaty, now the Geneva Convention. The guidelines called for the humane treatment of wounded soldiers and universal recognition of the neutrality of medical personnel, ambulances, and hospitals in time of war. The convention adopted a reverse Swiss flag, a red cross on a white ground, as an emblem of medical neutrality that would be easily recognized. They also urged each country to create its own national society of volunteers to provide battlefield relief when needed. Twelve European governments ratified the treaty, but the United States initially refused to sign on the grounds that it was a possible “entangling alliance.”

  Barton first became aware of the International Red Cross on a visit to Switzerland in 1869. She had spent the years immediately after the Civil War locating missing soldiers. Women wrote to Barton asking for help in finding husbands and sons whom they feared had ended up in Southern prisons. The anguish in their letters convinced her that finding missing soldiers was the most important thing she could do in the peace. She put together lists of missing soldiers, organized by location and unit, posted them in army hospitals, and had them printed in local and national newspapers, with the request that any information about the missing men be sent to her to pass on to their families. Eventually she received official sanction for the task. President Lincoln wrote a letter to the public informing them to contact her with information about missing soldiers. When her own resources were exhausted, Congress appropriated $15,000 to complete the project—close to $3 million today. The search for missing soldiers led to an effort to identify graves, beginning with the unmarked graves of the 13,000 Union soldiers who died in the prison camp at Andersonville, Georgia. Between 1865 and 1869, she helped locate 22,000 missing soldiers.

  She was already physically exhausted from her grueling work in the war, and her efforts after the war imposed a new kind of strain. In 1869, her doctors ordered her to Europe for a rest cure. She did not rest for long. Like Mary Phinney von Olnhausen, Barton felt called back into action by the Franco-Prussian War. She traveled to Strasbourg as a Red Cross volunteer, wearing a cross she improvised from a red ribbon and a Red Cross pin given her by the Grand Duchess Louise, daughter of Kaiser Wilhelm I. Barton’s experience in the Franco-Prussian War was very different from her experience in the American Civil War. Instead of soldiers, she worked with civilian victims. For her first several days in Strasbourg, she dutifully served soup and distributed supplies to survivors. But as she spent more time in the burned-out city, she realized that more than soup and soap were needed. She organized women into sewing workrooms as a first step in reestablishing the city’s economy. She organized a similar relief effort in Paris the following year.

  When she returned home in 1873, Barton took on the task of lobbying for the United States to ratify the Geneva Treaty. It took her nine years and three presidents, but at long last President Chester Arthur signed the treaty in 1882, and the Senate ratified it several days later.

  She founded the American Red Cross in 1881 and led it for the next twenty-three years. At her initiative, the American Red Cross proposed an amendment to the Geneva Treaty calling for the expansion of Red Cross relief to include victims of natural disasters. The so-called American Amendment, perhaps more accurately the “Barton Amendment,” was passed in 1884.

  Nursing Becomes a Profession

  In 1868, the American Medical Association (AMA), founded in 1847 and still finding its role in a rapidly changing profession in the years after the Civil War, recommended that general hospitals open schools to train nurses. It was a two-edged response to the success of volunteer nurses in the Civil War. The AMA both acknowledged the value of skilled nursing in hospitals and hoped to avoid another flood of untrained and uncontrollable volunteer nurses in future wars.

  The first nursing school in the United States opened during the war. The New Engla
nd Hospital for Women and Children, founded in 1862 by Dr. Marie Zakrzewska, had its own nurses’ training program, and the hospital’s articles of incorporation included training nurses as one of its fundamental purposes. Zakrzewska modeled her training program on that of the secular school of the Charity Hospital in Berlin, where she studied both midwifery and medicine. The six-month program focused on practical experience rather than medical theory. After a one-month probationary period, students received a small wage, board, and laundry service. In the first years, the nursing program made little progress. The hospital had little space and fewer resources to devote to the school; at the same time, few women were prepared to devote the required six months to a program that offered no diploma at the end. Zakrzewska trained only thirty-two nurses between 1862 and 1872; those women found themselves in demand as head nurses at hospitals and as private-duty nurses.