Heroines of Mercy Street

by Pamela D. Toler PhD

  The Illinois scenes in Mary’s autobiographical sketches will seem familiar to anyone who has read Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie, set roughly ten years after Mary’s own prairie experiences. She arrived to find a warm welcome, a cup of hot tea, and the prospect of useful employment. Her sister-in-law was too enfeebled by malaria to work. The well had been dry for weeks, so she had to melt snow to provide water for all their needs. Anything that needed to be done fell to Mary; it sometimes seemed to her like “one of those tasks set by cruel masters in fairy books.”13 In fact, work was exactly what she needed.

  The spring brought beauty with it, turning the prairie into paradise in Mary’s eyes, but paradise was always short-lived in her life. When an invasion of armyworms destroyed her brother’s corn crop in one day, he declared it was useless to replant because it was too late in the season; not discouraged, Mary replanted the eighty acres with the help of a neighbor and an outdated corn planter. She proudly noted in her autobiographical notes that “he never had a better or a bigger crop.”14 When a neighbor’s dogs attacked a recently bought pig while her brother was away from the house, Mary beat off the dogs with the help of the children and then struggled to kill and butcher the pig, which was injured beyond hope of saving.

  While Mary and her brother fought to make a living from the unforgiving land, rumors of war made their way to the prairie. The Phinney farm was four miles away from the post office and the family often went many days without receiving a letter or a newspaper. Nonetheless, over the course of winter and spring, news of the pending war reached the farm, piece by appalling piece. South Carolina, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, and Louisiana seceded from the Union in quick succession and formed a provisional government. State militias took over federal forts and arsenals throughout the south. Tennessee and Texas seceded in their turn.

  When news of the fall of Fort Sumter and the First Battle of Bull Run confirmed the rumors of war, Mary decided to volunteer as a nurse, or whatever else she could do to help the war effort. She wrote to anyone she knew who had any influence. Then, like women all over the North who wrote similar letters, she waited while the war went on without her. The Union’s senior generals changed as often as dance partners in a reel: Lincoln replaced head of the Army of the Potomac General McDowell with General George McClellan shortly after Bull Run, promoted McClellan to general-in-chief in November, and demoted McClellan once more four months later. In March 1862, the Army of the Potomac took Yorktown and Williamsburg in the Union’s first offense. A few days later at Shiloh, Grant forced the Confederate army to withdraw at the cost of tremendous Union casualties. In the Seven Days’ Battles in late June, the Army of the Potomac retreated in its turn before Lee’s forces, with enormous losses on both sides. At the Phinney homestead, distant from the front in Illinois, the war brought loss on a small scale as well: the family’s crops were good, but they had no way to get them to market because the military controlled the railroads. They burned corn as fuel that winter, and Mary mourned the waste.

  Finally, after a year, Mary refused to wait any longer. She headed back to Massachusetts, determined “to find some way to work for the soldiers.”15 Traveling east by train, she got a sense of the scale of the war for the first time as regiments boarded the already packed train at every city.

  Back in Boston, she contacted Miss Dix, who promised to place her at once. In early August 1862, more than a year after the “terrible affair at Bull Run” had inspired her to volunteer, von Olnhausen received a summons to come to Washington—with only two days’ notice. As was often the case with Miss Dix’s nurses, after all the delays and waiting, Mary Phinney von Olnhausen was needed in a hurry. The Battle of Cedar Mountain was under way, and four hundred wounded men already lay in need of care at Culpeper, Virginia.

  Anne Reading

  Anne Reading was a professional nurse, to the limited extent that such a thing existed in the United States at the beginning of the Civil War. Unlike von Olnhausen, she didn’t join the army’s nursing corps from patriotic zeal but because she needed the work.

  Anne was born on September 24, 1823, in Bethnal Green, then a working-class neighborhood in London known for slums, market gardens, and small-scale manufacturing, including silk weaving and boot making. (Later in the century the neighborhood would become infamous as one of the areas frequented by Jack the Ripper.) Reading was the eldest of eight children. Her father may have been a messenger, a job that would have placed him among the working poor. Most of what is known about her comes from her journal, edited by one of her descendants in 2006.

  It appears that Anne worked as a nurse in several British hospitals prior to March 1855, when she sailed for Turkey as part of the third contingent to join Florence Nightingale’s nursing corps. Despite Nightingale’s early efforts, nursing was still considered a lower-class job in England, associated in the popular mind with dirt and drink. Nonetheless, there is no reason to believe Anne was anything less than respectable since Nightingale held high moral standards for her nursing corps.

  Florence Nightingale had already earned a reputation as a nursing reformer when the Crimean War broke out in March 1854. Against the wishes of her wealthy and influential family, she trained at the innovative school attached to Lutheran Hospital in Kaiserswerth, Germany, where Pastor Theodor Fliedner established the first of the Protestant nursing orders known as deaconesses. On her return, she worked as the superintendent at a private charity hospital for ailing governesses, a population that shared the poverty but not the social stigma of the typical patient in a general hospital at the time. She was on the verge of taking a position as the head of nursing at King’s College Hospital when England entered the war in the Crimea.

  The Crimean War was the first to be fought in the press as well as on the battlefield. War correspondents reported not only on the movement of troops, but also on the conditions under which soldiers fought. William Howard Russell, the first and most famous of the new breed of reporters, revealed the conditions of the sick and wounded in the British camps to an outraged British public and called for a solution: “Are there no devoted women among us, able and willing to go forth to minister to the sick and suffering soldiers of the East in the hospitals of Scutari? Are none of the daughters of England, at this extreme hour of need, ready for such a work of mercy?”16 In response, Secretary of War Sidney Herbert gave Nightingale a commission to form a nursing corps and the lofty and very specific title of “Superintendent of the Female Nursing Establishment of the English General Hospitals in Turkey.” The title would seldom be used. Her nurses knew Nightingale as the lady-in-chief, and the soldiers called her “the Lady with the Lamp,” as she was the only woman allowed in the wards at night.

  On October 21, 1854, Nightingale and a group of women of varied nursing experience—ten Roman Catholic nuns, fourteen Anglican sisters, and fourteen lay nurses from various hospitals—sailed for Turkey. They arrived at the Barrack Hospital in Scutari, in Turkey outside of Constantinople, on November 4. They found no furniture, no blankets, and no medical supplies. The latrines were clogged and naked men lay on the floor in their own excrement. Before Nightingale’s corps could nurse, they had to clean. Nightingale’s first task was to acquire hundreds of scrubbing brushes and set convalescent soldiers to clean the wards from floor to ceiling.

  Anne set out from London on March 24, 1855, one of a group of twenty-seven nurses that was part of a third round of nurses sent from England to the British convalescent hospitals at Kulalee, also near Constantinople. Only a month before, an official “Report upon the state of the hospitals of the British Army in the Crimea and Scutari” described the duties of Nightingale’s nurses in detail, including dressing wounds, assisting doctors with the care of wounds, ensuring patients received the diet, drink, and medical comforts ordered by the doctor, and, most important of all from Nightingale’s perspective, seeing that both the wards and the patients were clean.17

  Nurses received a list of gear
they needed to provide for themselves, including a dark cotton gown, two flannel petticoats, and as much underclothing as their boxes would hold, as well as a list of uniform items the government would provide over the course of their first year of nursing. The list ended with the clear admonition that “no nurse is to expect any gift of clothing beyond this.”18 Nonetheless, just before Anne and her companions started on their journey, Lady Canning, one of the titled women who supported the hospital where Nightingale worked before the war, arrived at the station accompanied by a servant in livery who carried two large parcels containing “shawls of superior size and quality.”19 It was a welcome start to a long and often cold voyage.

  Unlike the nurses she would work beside in the American Civil War, whose letters, diaries, and memoirs often focused on gruesome details of wounds and illness, Anne described very little of the medical details of her work in the Crimea under Nightingale, perhaps because she was already familiar with the grim realities of surgical nursing. Instead she focused on the beauty of Constantinople and the details of her daily life. She shared an apartment with four other nurses a short distance from the hospital. Mornings and evenings were very cold, but the midday heat was so intense that it was impossible to be outdoors. The workday had a clear routine, similar to that of the nursing orders Nightingale had taken as her model:

  We rose at 7 o’clock, made our beds, then went out for prayers. After prayers we had breakfast and then went into the wards to attend to the patients until 1 o’clock. We had dinner and then back to the wards from 3 o’clock until 5:30. We then went for a walk until 6:30 when we had tea. After tea we were permitted to occupy our time as we pleased. We had prayers, then supper and retired for the night about 10 pm. On Sunday morning we go to the hospital at the usual time and at a quarter to eleven the bell rings for service. It is held in a very large ward and is a very pleasant sight in this far off land.20

  This orderly daily schedule was radically different from what Anne would experience at Mansion House Hospital.

  Anne’s status as one of Nightingale’s nurses would prove invaluable over the course of her nursing career, but she served less than three months in the Crimea. In early June, she fell ill while visiting Constantinople. A chill and a violent headache developed into what was then called “Crimean fever,” now believed to have been brucellosis, a highly infectious bacterial disease carried by animals. Back at Kulalee, she went to work at the hospital the next day because they expected a large number of sick and wounded men to arrive from the Crimea. It was her last day at work as a Nightingale nurse. The next morning she was too sick to go to the hospital. Fevered, she passed in and out of consciousness for several days, cared for constantly by one of the other nurses. Her doctor finally reached the conclusion she would never recover her health if she remained in Turkey. She left Kulalee on June 25, 1855, on a transport ship filled with sick and wounded English soldiers who had been discharged from combat duty for medical reasons.

  After a long period of convalescence, Anne spent the next five years working as a surgical nurse in London, first at University Hospital and later at St. Mary’s Hospital. In 1860, “looking for a more extended sphere of practise,”21 she decided to sail to the United States, where her younger sister Jenny worked in Yonkers. She arrived in New York City in October and soon found lodging with a German widow and her adult children. While she looked for nursing work, she helped the daughter make cloaks and mantles on a piecework basis, one of the often grueling cottage industries that allowed women to make a scanty living working at home.

  Anne had been in New York for a full month when she saw an ad for a nursing job. She went immediately to ask about the position, but the gentleman who was hiring looked over her credentials and told her she needed a better job than he could offer her. He referred her to a friend who was connected with St. Luke’s, a private hospital run by the Anglican Church. At first it seemed like another dead end. Most of the nurses there were Anglican deaconesses, who worked without compensation. At first Miss Ayers, the lady superintendent, told Anne they not only had no nursing vacancies, but they had a waiting list of job applicants. Upon looking at Anne’s testimonials, however, Miss Ayers suggested a compromise: Anne could work for them for three months for board, lodging, and washing. If they could not offer her a paid job at the end of that time, they would help her find another position.

  Reading asked for several days to think it over. The next morning she took the train to Yonkers so she could consult with her sister. The offer was not ideal, but work of any kind was scarce in New York, where the economy had not yet recovered from the crash of 1857. Reading decided to take the job.

  She began work at St. Luke’s on December 17, three days before South Carolina seceded from the Union. In her journal she describes a “neat and comfortable” hospital that was a far cry from the public hospitals of the day, with white bedroom furniture and white counterpanes, a few books in each room, coconut matting in the hallways to mute the sounds of footsteps, and the still-rare luxury of indoor water closets and hot-air heating. Her journal over the next few months reports holiday celebrations, visits to friends in the country, and the pleasure of watching snow fall on Central Park from the comfort of a heated room. “Here every day brings its duties, its privileges and its enjoyments,” she wrote with apparent contentment. “We do not have much of what the world calls pleasure but we do enjoy peace and quietness, food and rainment [sic] and a comfortable home, such as thousands in America, aye and in England, too, would be glad to possess.”22 She shows a clear satisfaction with her work during her first months at St. Luke’s, as well as a sense of superiority about the relative skills of English and American surgeons, in one case noting, “It is here considered to be a very clever operation though in the London hospitals it would be thought of little importance.”23

  The outbreak of war disturbed Anne’s fragile sense of financial security. The Northern economy had never quite recovered from the panic of 1857, and the secession of the Southern states brought renewed panic and an economic downturn. Bankers feared the Southern states would repudiate their debts, and merchants feared Southern purchasers might stop buying Northern goods. By May, Anne was all too aware that financial difficulties had trickled down from Wall Street to the man on the street. The firm in Yonkers where her sister had worked was closed. People who had depended on day labor to support themselves now wandered the streets of New York, starving, destitute, and miserable. Where her American counterparts wrote in their letters and diaries of the men they knew enlisting from patriotic zeal, Anne saw it as a financial necessity for many: “There is now nothing left for a man to do but enlist for a soldier for in that way alone he can contribute towards the support of his family.”24 By July, Anne began to tour other hospitals and mental asylums, in what looks like the early stages of a job hunt: assessing both the quality of their facilities and their pay rates in comparison to those at St. Luke’s.

  When the opportunity came, Anne proved herself to be more skilled at networking than many of the women who sought to join the new army nursing corps. On Monday, April 7, 1862, Mrs. Fabbric, an influential woman who was one of St. Luke’s regular charity visitors, came into Anne’s ward. In the course of discussing the war and hospitals, Anne took a calculated risk and told the visitor she wanted a position nursing the sick and wounded in the army. After that, things moved quickly. On Wednesday, Mrs. Fabbric brought Anne an invitation to meet the following morning with a local committee that hired nurses. The next day, after some effort to bargain over the salary, she accepted a position as an army nurse at the standard rate of $12 a month.

  Anne gave notice to St. Luke’s on April 11. On April 13, she received instructions to go to Mrs. Dix in Washington; from there she would be sent wherever she was most needed. She was told to limit her luggage to a small traveling trunk and a carpetbag containing whatever she required for immediate use. Since she had no permanent home in the United States, she arranged to leave the rest of her be
longings at St. Luke’s.

  Preparations made and goodbyes said, she noted in her journal, “I am now anxiously awaiting orders.”25

  Trains, Ships, and Baggage Cars

  Once appointed, nurses faced a new challenge: traveling to their assignments.

  In the early months of the war, new nurses paid their own expenses and made their own arrangements as best they could, often hampered by inexperience and Victorian ideas about propriety. More than one woman found her way smoothed by chance encounters with men who escorted them to the next stage in their journey.

  By 1862, the government was required to provide travel expenses for nurses working for Dorothea Dix, but getting the proper documents was often a challenge. In Hospital Sketches, Louisa May Alcott subjects her fictional counterpart, Tribulation Periwinkle, to an only slightly exaggerated version of her own efforts to obtain the free rail pass from Boston to Washington to which her appointment entitled her. Over the course of two days she was referred from one official to another, including at one point the governor of Massachusetts, and sent from one side of the city to the other. Even her “General,” an anonymous version of Miss Dix, told her, “Don’t be discouraged; and if you don’t succeed, come to me and we will see what to do next” but gives her no practical assistance. She had reached the point where she felt that “if I had been in search of the Koh-i-noor diamond I would have been as likely to find it”; she was about to give up and buy a ticket, when she ran into her brother-in-law, who helped her run through the bureaucratic maze needed to get her official pass, just in time for dinner with her sister and a sentimental farewell at the train station.26