Louisa on the Front Lines

by Samantha Seiple

  The medical rounds took up the better part of the afternoon. One additional task for Lu and the nurses was to write to patients’ families so they would know where they were hospitalized. Newspapers also printed the names of the hospitals and wounded soldiers, but often space was limited. Family members could also write or visit the Sanitary Commission in Washington, DC, where the list was updated every day.

  Lu enjoyed helping the soldiers write these letters. They all gave accounts of the battles they were in and ended with requests for care packages filled with food. “This I like to do for they put in such odd things & express their ideas so comically I have great fun interiorally while as grave as possible exteriorally,” Lu explained. She came upon Robert Bain struggling to write a letter with his remaining hand. When he gave it to her to mail, she noticed he was blushing and saw the words “Dearest Jane” at the top of the letter. The thought cheered her up, and she hoped that when he closed his eyes to go to sleep that night, he would dream of his sweetheart.

  At five o’clock a bell rang, alerting the nurses and resting patients that supper was ready. Trays were brought out, and the men were served weak tea with milk and sugar and bread with butter. Eating seemed to be their only pleasure. “I presently discovered that it took a very bad wound to incapacitate the defenders of the faith for their consumption of their rations,” Lu wryly observed. Hannah always served generous helpings and was even willing to give up her own ration if there wasn’t enough. “I find Mrs. Ropes very motherly & kind,” Lu revealed.

  After supper, Lu and the other nurses assisted the doctors on their rounds. Medicine was given out, faces were washed, bandages were checked, and lullabies were sung. “By eleven, the last labor of love was done; the last ‘good night’ spoken.… Night and nature took our places. Filling that great house of pain with the healing miracles of Sleep, and his diviner brother, Death.”

  SHORTLY AFTER Lu began working as a nurse, she developed a cough, just like many of the patients. Hannah marked it down as “purely sympathetic.” Lu didn’t let it interfere with her work. She was up every morning at the crack of dawn working tirelessly for her patients, whom she affectionately called “my boys” and “big babies.” “Though often homesick, heartsick, and worn out, I like it, find real pleasure in comforting, tending, and cheering these poor souls who seem to love me, to feel my sympathy though unspoken, and acknowledge my hearty good-will, in spite of the ignorance, awkwardness, and bashfulness which I cannot help showing in so new and trying situation,” Lu wrote of these encounters in her journal.

  Each morning, one of the first things Lu did after getting dressed was to dash through the ballroom and banquet hall, opening the windows and doors. The reason? “The air is bad enough to breed a pestilence & as no notice is taken of our frequent appeals for better ventilation I must do what I can,” Lu explained. Some of the windows were nailed shut, and the lower sashes could only be opened a few inches. The patients’ beds were situated directly under the windows, and the frosty morning air made the men shiver. She would try to make her chilled patients more comfortable by stoking the fire, covering them with extra blankets, and making them laugh. Then she would “continue to open doors and windows as if my life depended upon it. Mine does, and doubtless many another, for a more perfect pestilence-box than this house I never saw—cold, damp, dirty, full of vile odors from wounds, kitchens, wash-rooms, and stables.”

  The sickening smells didn’t help Lu’s appetite, but, even so, she would head to the dining room for breakfast. Sitting down at the unpolished table was sweet relief for her aching feet, which was a common complaint among nurses, especially at the Union Hotel Hospital. The old ballroom and banquet hall were divided up into little rooms, which kept the nurses running back and forth, tending to their many patients. “It is as much work to take care of 25 here as it is of 100 in one room. It keeps you on your feet all the time,” Hannah Stevenson observed while she was the matron at the hospital.

  Mealtime was a chance for Lu to rest momentarily, but she found breakfast disappointing. The “inevitable fried beef, salt butter, husky bread & washy coffee” did not tempt her in the least. As she ate, she focused her attention on the eight women and dozen men talking at the table. Among the hired nurses, there were some very well-educated women. Lu liked kindhearted Hannah Ropes, and she thought pint-sized Julia Kendall was “the most faithful of workers, too much so for her own good,” always refusing to rest. But, also among the nurses, Lu found “a few very disagreeable women whom I don’t care to know.”

  Lu was disgusted by “the sanctified nurse who sung hymns & prayed violently while stealing men’s watches & money.” Another nurse, who was a “much esteemed lady,” wore a devout expression on her face, which had earned the chaplain’s approval, until it was discovered that she was urging her patients to leave everything to her in their last will and testament. “Everything here strikes me as very odd & shiftless both within & without, people, manners, customs & ways of living, but I like to watch it all & am very glad I came as this is the sort of study I enjoy,” Lu revealed, hoping that her study would improve her writing, but not knowing at the time that it was going to bring realism and authenticity to it. Some of it was also going to remind her of home.

  When Lu turned her attention to the conversations the men were having at the table, she found them to be “both ludicrous and provoking.” Having grown up surrounded by some of the most progressive thinkers of the era, Lu didn’t have patience for condescending attitudes. “The conversation is entirely among themselves & each announces his opinion with an air of importance that frequently causes me to choke in my cup or bolt my meals with undignified speed lest a laugh betray to these pompous beings that a ‘child’s among them takin notes,’” Lu wrote.

  At first, if the topic of slavery ever came up, Lu tried to keep her opinions to herself. She had been warned that there were many Southern sympathizers in Georgetown and Washington, DC. Although she held her tongue, her actions spoke louder than any words. She tested her belief that everyone, regardless of race, should be treated as equals, and Lu’s behavior shocked some of the hospital workers.

  One time when Lu went into the nurses’ kitchen to get some gruel for her patients, she noticed a black baby wobbling about, so she scooped the baby up into her arms. A white woman saw and exclaimed, “Gracious!… how can you? I’ve been here six months, and never so much as touched the little toad with a poker.”

  “More shame for you, ma’am,” Lu said, no longer able to keep quiet. Lu kissed the baby, and, finding her voice, gave the woman an antislavery lecture.

  The racial tension and prejudice in the hospital surprised Lu, especially because everyone was working together to help the Union win the war. But she realized not everyone was an abolitionist, and not everyone believed in equal rights.

  After Lu kissed the baby and spoke out against slavery, the woman thought Lu was “a dangerous fanatic.” But Lu didn’t waver from her beliefs, and the opposition only made her want to speak out against it.

  “The men would swear at the ‘darkies,’ would put two gs in negro, and scoff at the idea of any good coming from such trash,” Lu observed. “The nurses were willing to be served by the colored people, but seldom thanked them, never praised, and scarcely recognized them in the street; whereat the blood of two generations of abolitionists waxed hot in my veins, and at the first opportunity, proclaimed itself, and asserted the right of free speech.”

  Another hot topic infuriating people—not just in the hospital but throughout the world—was the battle at Fredericksburg, which Hannah called a “murder ground.” People wanted to know who was to blame for the “soul-sickening slaughter,” and, with the Confederacy’s independence still a real possibility, whether it was the end of the United States. While the Confederacy was celebrating its victory, the morale among Union soldiers was so low that tens of thousands of men were deserting.

  “Burnside nobody blames.… If in the beginning our President h
ad declared freedom for all, and armed all, the rebellion would not have lasted three months,” Hannah wrote. “But the North was not ready to respond to such a scheme and here we are! The true question was, whether we would have our sons sacrificed, or the blacks, for whose freedom this war is waged. We decided, as we always have done, pig-headedly—and now the only way out of this trouble remains just where it did before, only to be gained by immediate, unreserved emancipation.… But I must not preach now, for my use is work.”

  Although President Lincoln still had a reputation for being honest, he was blamed for the disaster at Fredericksburg, making him very unpopular. Rumors were running rampant. There was talk of Lincoln resigning or being overthrown and replaced by General McClellan. “The popular heart beats low in response to the outcry of the imbeciles in Washington,” the Bedford Gazette reported.

  The widow’s wail goes up to heaven for a husband sacrificed in vain.… The homes of the North are desolate and Richmond is not taken, nor is the Union restored. Is it strange that the people have lost confidence in the President? Is it strange that the war has become unpopular?… But whatever may be the consequence of this last and most dreadful disaster, and while we know that the President is and will be held responsible therefore, we can only mourn the loss of the brave and good men who fell on the bloodstained heights of Fredericksburg. They fell in vain and we can but honor their gallantry and cherish their memory.

  President Lincoln was well aware of his unpopularity. “They wish to get rid of me, and I am sometimes half disposed to gratify them,” Lincoln said. “We are now on the brink of destruction.” Although Lincoln was blamed, General Burnside took full responsibility for the slaughter, and he offered his resignation to the president. Burnside’s soldiers had lost all confidence in his leadership abilities, which caused some high-ranking officers to loudly campaign for General McClellan’s return, but Lincoln refused to accept it. In Lincoln’s address to the Army of the Potomac, he said, “Although you were not successful, the attempt was not an error, nor the failure other than an accident.” He praised the troops for their unfailing courage under the enemy’s relentless fire and offered his condolences and sympathies to the families of the dead and wounded. He ended by congratulating them “that the number of both [the dead and wounded] is comparatively so small.”

  But the number of dead and wounded wasn’t small no matter how Lincoln tried to spin it. The Union Hotel Hospital was crowded, overflowing with patients, and more were expected to arrive with even more serious injuries. With the hospital “full of amputated limbs” and other life-threatening injuries and illnesses, Lu and the other nurses had to be off and running right after breakfast. “Till noon I trot, trot,” Lu wrote, “giving out rations, cutting up food for helpless ‘boys,’ washing faces, teaching my attendants how beds are made or floors swept, dressing wounds, taking Dr. Fitz Patrick’s orders, (privately wishing all the time that he would be more gentle with my big babies,) dusting tables, sewing bandages, keeping my tray tidy, rushing up & down after pillows, bed linen, sponges, books & directions, till it seems as if I would joyfully pay down all I possess for fifteen minutes rest.”

  One of the more burdensome responsibilities for Lu and the other nurses was trying to keep their wards clean by motivating the hospital attendants, who were also convalescing patients. The still-sick soldiers were expected to sweep and scrub floors, lift heavy trays, run up and down the many stairs, and move the sicker soldiers. If the attendants didn’t perform their duties, the nurses were expected to take care of things. Nurse Sarah Low wrote, “It is something like keeping house with a large family & always expecting company & having very poor help.”

  Lu found it difficult to work with the two attendants in her ward. “If we had capable attendants things would go nicely,” she reasoned, “but sick soldiers being mortal will give out, get cross or keep out of sight in a surprisingly successful manner which induces the distracted nurse to wish she were a family connection of Job’s. I have old McGee… & a jolly old soul he is but not a Mercury. My other helper is a vile boy who gobbles up my stores, hustles ‘my boys,’ steals my money & causes my angry passions to rise.” Yet, rather than complain, she moved through her ward like a “ghost from six in the morning till nine at night haunting & haunted for when not doing something I am endeavoring to decide what comes next being sure some body is in need of my maternal fussing.”

  The reason Lu was so intent was that she wanted to be sent next to a field hospital near the front lines, and she was trying to learn as much as she could about nursing. This meant not shying away from the operations, including amputations, because the surgeon on the battlefield was considered an “amputation specialist.” “I witnessed several operations,” Lu wrote. “For the height of my ambition was to go to the front after a battle, and feeling that the sooner I inured myself to trying sights, the more useful I should be.”

  Like the other nurses, Lu would learn that serious head, chest, and abdomen wounds were typically fatal. Operations for these types of injuries were usually out of the question. Surgeons would try to stop bleeding arteries and remove any visible, easy-to-reach bone fragments and bullets. Morphine would help kill the pain, but there wasn’t much more that could be done, other than pray. Bullets in or through the feet, legs, hands, and arms, however, were a different story. In these cases, doctors could amputate, and sometimes the patients would survive. But without germ theory and antiseptics, infection and gangrene inevitably followed. “The amputation cases are dying in all hospitals of just poison,” nurse Sarah Low observed. “Some think it is an epidemic.” Half of the amputees would die. This was better odds than having a chest or abdomen wound, but it was still seven times safer to fight a three-day battle than to have a limb cut off.

  One eyewitness chronicled the scene at a field hospital after the First Battle of Bull Run with this graphic description:

  Tables about breast high had been erected upon which the screaming victims were having legs and arms cut off. The surgeons and their assistants, stripped to the waist and bespattered with blood, stood around, some holding the poor fellows while others, armed with long, bloody knives and saws, cut and sawed away with frightful rapidity, throwing the mangled limbs on a pile nearby as soon as removed.… Many were stretched on the ground, awaiting their turn… while those whom operations had already been performed calmly fanned the flies from their wounds. But… some moved not—for them the surgeons’ skill had not availed.

  After the battle at Antietam, the surgeons in the field were harshly criticized for being too eager to amputate. On Christmas Day in 1862, the New York Times reported, “The butchery practiced by some of the volunteer surgeons on the battle-field at Antietam will not be repeated again, if it lies in the power of Gen[eral] Hammond to prevent it.… Thigh-bone amputations, (which some medical butchers take especial delight in practicing, and which all surgical experiments have demonstrated to be impossible, if saving the life of the patient is the object to be attained,)… are positively forbidden.”

  Lu noticed that, in addition to his general roughness with patients, Dr. Fitzpatrick seemed to enjoy performing intricate amputations on them. “I find him in a state of bliss over a complicated amputation.… [He] works away, with his head upside down, as he ties an artery, saws a bone, or does a little needle work with a visible relish and very sanguinary pair of hands,” Lu wrote.

  If a patient died, he was taken to the “dead house” located in the basement. Sometimes the doctors would dissect the bodies. The youngest doctor at the Union Hotel Hospital, twenty-six-year-old John Winslow, invited Lu to watch a dissection, but she refused. “My nerves belonged to the living, not the dead.… [The] idea was a rather trying one, when I knew the subject was some person whom I had nursed and cared for,” Lu wrote. Despite the off-putting invitation to watch a dissection, Lu thought Dr. Winslow, or “Dr. John” as she called him, was a gentleman. But she also thought he was “plain, odd, sentimental… kind-hearted as a woman & r
ather quaint, being bred a Quaker.”

  Dr. John had been raised by his aunt and uncle in Massachusetts after his parents died. They loved him as their own son and prepared him for Harvard University by sending him to the prestigious Phillips Exeter Academy. After graduating from Harvard, Dr. John was a teacher for two years before enrolling at Harvard Medical School. But he dropped out. When he learned that the Union army was in desperate need of doctors to treat the massive number of wounded, he offered his services. At the time, a medical degree wasn’t necessary to practice medicine, which was considered more of a healing art than a medical science. So anyone could call himself a doctor. But the Union army tried to weed out those with questionable credentials by having them take the required surgeon’s and assistant surgeon’s exams.

  Like most reputable physicians, when Dr. John was trying to figure out how to treat patients, he relied on the best-selling medical book Treatise on the Practice of Medicine by the well-known Dr. George Wood. Although the medical treatments weren’t based on formal scientific research, they were remedies that doctors had tried on patients. Some of them worked.

  For example, if a patient was flushed, had chills, was shivering and sweating, Dr. John would prescribe a dose of quinine to reduce the fever from malaria. Even though malaria was believed to be caused by bad air rather than mosquitoes, quinine works (and is still used today). For a cold, fever, or diarrhea, which was a common and often life-threatening ailment among the soldiers, Dover’s Powder, containing ipecac and opium, was prescribed as a possible cure. If a wound became infected, it was believed cutting open a vein and letting the patient bleed would reduce the infection.