Heroines of Mercy Street

by Pamela D. Toler PhD

  By the end of the war, Alexandria had thirty-three military hospitals of different sizes and designed for different purposes, not including the infamous Camp Convalescent located outside the city, known by those condemned to stay there as Camp Misery. One of those hospitals was the Mansion House Hospital, formerly Green’s Mansion House Hotel.

  For several months after Alexandria was seized, Union officers were billeted at the Mansion House Hotel and at Green’s home, the adjacent Carlyle House, the “mansion” for which Mansion House was named. In his diary, Green’s son complained about the noise and the manners of their new “guests.” Those who were billeted at the Green home kept the family awake, dancing and singing overhead, while those at the Mansion House were making a mess that would require months of cleaning and repair. The Greens would soon wish noisy Union officers were all they had to complain about.

  In November 1861, James Green received a letter notifying him that the government was confiscating the hotel for use as a hospital. They gave him two days to vacate, but even with the help of his employees from the furniture factory it took more than a week to move everything. The government offered Green a large rent for the mandatory use of the hotel, but when the first month’s payment came due, he learned that rent payments depended on his taking an oath of allegiance to the United States government. He refused, leaving the rent uncollected.

  Mansion House Hospital was the largest of the army’s fourteen general hospitals in Alexandria, with 516 beds and a library with an organ on the first floor, where those soldiers who were ambulatory could read and gather for church services. Joseph Spafford, a soldier from the Fourth Vermont Regiment who was diagnosed with pleurisy and sent to Mansion House from his regiment in April 1862, wrote a remarkably enthusiastic account of the hospital’s accommodations, telling his family that “they keep everything as slick & nice as at any Hotel.” He even raved about the rations: “We have bread & butter, oysters, chicken, roast beef, boiled beef, and in fact as good as we could ask if it were a Hotel & we were stoping here.”10 This is a glowing description of military hospital food that does not match that given in other sources for the period. Possibly he did not want his mother to worry.

  Mary von Olnhausen’s first impression of the hospital, several months later, was that it was loud, confused, and crowded. The surgical ward showed its origins as a hotel with many small rooms opening off of a broad hallway, a design that was not efficient for its new purpose. So many cots were crammed into each room that it was barely possible to pass between them, even without the forbidden hoops under her skirts.11 Spafford, looking at the hospital with the eyes of a man who had recently arrived from the mud and gore of the field in a horse-drawn ambulance, was more positive: “This Hos [sic] is a splendid building, I think the best in the city.”12

  Mary Phinney von Olnhausen Arrives at Mansion House

  Mary Phinney von Olnhausen arrived in Washington in August 1862, shortly after what she described as “that awful Cedar Mountain battle.”13

  On August 9, a corps of Union soldiers led by General Nathaniel P. Banks stumbled upon Stonewall Jackson’s infantry at the base of Cedar Mountain, near Culpeper Court House, Virginia, also known prior to the battle as Slaughter’s Mountain. One Union army surgeon remarked that it was “truly named for the slaughter was tremendous on both sides.”14 Outnumbered three to one by Jackson, Banks lost more than a third of his men: 314 killed, 1,445 wounded, and 622 missing.15 As was so often the case in the Civil War, the horror continued after the battle was over.

  Thomas A. McParlin, medical director of the federal Army of Virginia at the time and later medical director of the Army of the Potomac, established dressing stations near the battlefield and an evacuation hospital at Culpeper Court House, where military trains could take on the wounded and carry them the fifty miles to Alexandria. By the next day it was clear to him that the surgeons on the ground, overwhelmed by the numbers of wounded, had lost track of the primary goal: sending the wounded to Alexandria. Instead they focused on the amputations they believed were needed to save men’s lives; one doctor alone performed twenty-two thigh amputations and an uncounted number of arm amputations in a twenty-four-hour period.

  There was no one to attend to soldiers with relatively minor wounds. Supplies and tempers ran short. Even though trains were available, every building that could be turned into a shelter—churches, the Masonic hall, private homes, and even a tobacco barn—were filled with hundreds of wounded men. Hundreds more lay in the hot August sun awaiting evacuation, many of them dehydrated and groaning for water. McParlin sent the orders a second time, reminding doctors that the wounded were to be sent on by train as soon after they arrived as possible. Hours later, he discovered that nothing had changed; he went to Culpeper Court House himself and saw to it personally that the first train of railroad cars was loaded with men and on its way.16 After nine days of hell, the last trainload of wounded from Culpeper Court House reached Washington on August 18.

  When von Olnhausen first arrived in Washington she expected to go to Culpeper Court House. Miss Dix had just received a telegram that there were four hundred soldiers lying there with their wounds undressed and no one to care for them. “She goes herself and takes me,” she wrote to her friends at home in Lexington. “So already the work has begun.”17 Instead, some change of plan led Dix to place von Olnhausen at Mansion House Hospital in Alexandria, possibly in response to an appeal from Medical Director McParlin for volunteers—specifically “surgeons and nurses (male)”18—to come to Alexandria to help with the wounded. The call for “nurses (male)” would have been an irresistible challenge to Dix.

  As she often did, Dix accompanied the new nurse to her assignment, perhaps in this case because she wanted to warn von Olnhausen that the surgeon in charge of Mansion House was determined to keep Dix nurses out of his hospital. Von Olnhausen was to ignore whatever trouble he gave her and not complain about how she was treated no matter what happened. It was not a reassuring start to a new job.

  Once at Mansion House, Dix left von Olnhausen in the hospital office and went in search of the chief surgeon, Dr. Alfred Summers. While she waited, von Olnhausen watched the wounded from Cedar Ridge arrive. All of them were in the condition in which they had been taken off the battlefield. Some of them had lain outside in the summer heat for three or four days “almost without clothing, their wounds never dressed, so dirty and so wretched.”19 Those who could walk were helped on foot into the hospital. The worst were carried in on stretchers. Those who died in the hospital were carried out almost as quickly. Von Olnhausen worried that it was more than she could bear and feared that Miss Dix would never return. It seemed to von Olnhausen like she had waited forever.

  Finally the nursing superintendent arrived with Dr. Summers, who looked von Olnhausen over with what seemed to her to be a savage eye. He told her he had no room for her. Dix had not yet succeeded in her efforts to place her nurses at Mansion House, and the doctor intended to keep them out. Dix was aware that Summers intended to make the hospital so uncomfortable for von Olnhausen that the new nurse wouldn’t stay long, but she was determined that von Olnhausen tough it out. When von Olnhausen told Dix she could not stay if she didn’t have a place to sleep, Dix brushed aside the forty-year-old volunteer’s concerns and told her, “My child… you will stay where I have placed you.”20

  With no room of her own, von Olnhausen slept at the bedside of her patients or in a corner of one of the rooms for several weeks. Occasionally one of the other nurses would “extend the hospitality of the floor” in her room to von Olnhausen, who would have a straw bed dragged in and get a few hours of rest. “It was no use to complain,” she wrote in her half-finished memoir. “The surgeon simply stormed at me and said there was no room.” When Miss Dix arrived at the hospital on one of her whirlwind visits, she would tell von Olnhausen, “You can bear it awhile my child; I have placed you here and you must stay.”21

  It was often difficult to arrange housing for fe
male nurses, a problem doctors used as a means of keeping female nurses out of the hospitals. Where some limited space was available, such as in former hotels and boarding schools, nurses slept in hospital closets or packed together in a single room. In some hospitals, nurses hung a curtain across a corner to create a space for themselves. In the most extreme cases, nurses were quartered in private homes as much as three miles away from the hospitals where they worked.

  Even after a nurse had been assigned space in a hospital, circumstances were always subject to change. The arrival of a new nurse could mean a private room had to be shared. When patients’ family members arrived, often having traveled a long distance and with little means to support themselves in a strange city, nurses grumbled yet shared their quarters. Von Olnhausen, having finally been assigned a room of her own, tells of a period when a revolving cast of incoming nurses and family members visiting patients left her with five women to find sleeping quarters for. She managed to find empty beds for two of them in her ward, “but we were still four,—all widows, all old, and all but me exceedingly pious, and ministers’ widows at that.” Sleeping was hard enough, with “only bedding for two, and the room not large.” Crowded rooms created the added problem of lack of privacy: with her unwanted visitors sitting in her room all day Sunday, then Monday, then Tuesday, it was impossible to write letters or even keep the room tidy. She couldn’t dress or wash in peace and the ward was so cold she could not sit there with any comfort. Between lack of privacy and running errands for her hapless visitors, she was completely worn out by the time she had the room to herself once more.

  Von Olnhausen was just starting to feel settled when all her arrangements were turned upside down by the arrival of a new nurse at the hospital, one who claimed to have served in the Crimea. Von Olnhausen was not sure she believed the new nurse’s tales of the Crimea, but admitted there was no doubt she was English and an experienced nurse.

  Anne Reading Arrives at Mansion House

  Anne Reading’s introduction to Mansion House Hospital was considerably different from von Olnhausen’s. Reading arrived in Washington from New York City on the afternoon of August 20, after traveling all night and morning. She went straight to Miss Dix’s home, where she learned that the ever peripatetic Dix was in Baltimore.

  Dix’s servants sent Reading to the Union Hospital in Georgetown, which served as a way station for nurses while they waited for their assignments. Reading was not as vehement as Alcott and others in her condemnation of the hospital, possibly because she had just spent four months on the hospital transport ships, but she certainly wasn’t impressed. The hospital steward showed her into a room “with nothing in it but three miserable looking little beds” and two strangers with whom she would share the room. Having been promised breakfast, she went downstairs “expecting a comfortable repast.” Instead the steward gave her coffee, “such miserable stuff, little more than colored water… That, and a piece of dry bread composed my breakfast. I might certainly have had butter if I chose but the smell of it almost made me sick so I did not venture to taste it.”22

  Miss Dix greeted her the next morning with enthusiasm: she had so many places that needed a good nurse that she hardly knew where to send Reading. Since the nursing supervisor had a morning full of tasks to complete, she settled Reading in a comfortable chair with the morning papers, a pile of books, and a plate of “sweet cracknels”—a brief respite between the squalor of Union Hospital and the challenges of a new assignment.

  In the afternoon, Reading, still unsure of her final destination, traveled to Alexandria with Dix and a woman who had come to Washington specifically to visit the different hospitals in the region. After inspecting several of Alexandria’s hospitals, they came to the Mansion House. Reading noted in her journal that “almost everyone employed there had some grievance to complain of. The nurses said they were overworked and the Doctors did not behave well to them. As for the surgeon in charge, he was a perfect brute and much more to the same effect. Miss Dix smiled, and said to me ‘This is the very place you should come to, for you do not mind these horrid doctors and these poor things are so afraid of them that it makes them miserable.’” Reading thought it sounded like an unpleasant situation, but she needed the work and was determined to make the best of things, so she kept her peace.

  Reading’s first encounter with Dr. Summers was similar to von Olnhausen’s. Dix accosted him on the street and said, “Good morning, Doctor. I have found a most excellent nurse for you.” He spun around and snarled what seems to have been his stock answer to the arrival of a new Dix nurse: “Madam, I have not room for another nurse.” According to Reading, he changed his position when Dix told him who Reading was and where she had worked before. The Nightingale reference worked its magic once more.

  The evening Reading arrived, Dr. Summers assigned her to a small ward with some severe cases. The next morning, while dressing her patients’ wounds, she amazed the doctor with her technique, the English method of bandaging being different than that practiced in the United States. He soon brought several other doctors into her ward to observe her skills.

  The next day Dr. Summers sent for Reading. She found him in conversation with several others doctors and tried to excuse herself, but he waved her back. “Madam, I am going to give you charge of the large medical ward.” He then announced to the other doctors, “Gentlemen, this is the best nurse I ever met with. She can dress wounds equal to any surgeon and not one of our people can compare with her in putting on a bandage.”23

  Von Olnhausen had previously been in charge of the ward that Summers transferred to Reading. She did not take the change well.

  Von Olnhausen’s account of Summers’s transfer of the ward is remarkably close to Reading’s; if anything, Summers is even more complimentary of Reading in von Olnhausen’s version of events, not only proclaiming that Reading was the most splendid nurse in the country, but that she was the kind of woman he intended to fill the hospital with. To make matters worse, von Olnhausen had to share her room with Reading for several weeks, until Reading’s sister Jenny, also an experienced hospital nurse, joined her in mid-September.

  “I almost preferred no bed, as at first,” she wrote to her family in what she described as a “growling letter.” “But I would not say one word it seems so selfish to complain here.”24 She then proceeded to complain at length. By her account, the ward was without a female nurse for a long time before she took charge of it. She worked hard to get it clean and orderly, and to get rid of the ward master, who was “a horrid wicked man” who “treated the patients too cruelly.”25 Now, moved to a smaller, less difficult ward, she found she just wasn’t as interested in the new patients. Her heart was still in the old ward. She acknowledged Reading’s superiority in bandaging but condemned Reading in terms based on the conventional assessment of professional nurses at the time, saying, “Like all old hospital nurses, [she] is no nurse otherwise.”26 Von Olnhausen’s care of her patients was as all encompassing as a mother with a seriously ill child. She cooked special dishes for them, watched over them at night when they needed her, and only left her ward to eat or sleep. By contrast, Reading went over her patients’ wounds several times a day but did not spend all her time in the wards, keeping a routine that sounds very similar to that of the Nightingale hospital in the Crimea, in which nurses attended patients in the wards at regular times unless the press of newly arrived wounded required nurses to work round the clock. It is possible that Reading, if asked, might in turn have declared her new co-worker “no nurse.”

  Von Olnhausen ends her account with a description of Reading’s first moments in her new ward, an incident that, for obvious reasons, does not appear in Reading’s journal. Just as von Olnhausen was leaving her old ward, she heard a horrible noise in the entry. Looking out, she saw Reading being dragged along by two officers, dead drunk and swearing like a trooper. “So that’s the way she took possession of her new ward!” she told her correspondents. “I think my exit was bet
ter than her entrance.”27

  Hostile Doctors and Inexperienced Nurses

  Dr. Summers was not the only physician to oppose the introduction of female nurses, especially ones chosen by Dorothea Dix, into army hospitals. In fact, meeting a hostile doctor was almost a rite of passage for nurses as they arrived at a new hospital.

  Georgeanna Woolsey, writing later about the early days of the war, described their shared experience: “No one knows who did not watch the thing from the beginning, how much opposition, how much ill-will, how much unfeeling want of thought, these women nurses endured. Hardly a surgeon whom I can think of received or treated them with even common courtesy. Government had decided that women should be employed, and the Army surgeons—unable, therefore, to close the hospitals against them—determined to make their lives so unbearable that they should be forced in self-defence to leave. It seemed a matter of cool calculation.”28

  Many doctors objected to women in military hospitals on the grounds of feminine delicacy, both mental and physical. An anonymous doctor summed up this position in a letter to the influential American Medical Times. “S. G.” shared his concerns regarding the ability of women to do anything more than give the “delicate, soothing attentions which are always so grateful to the sick, and which… none know so well how to give, as do noble, sensible, tender-hearted women.” He argued that male surgical cases required “strong arms and attentions which any reasonable man is loath to exact from female nurses,” making female nurses not only an annoyance in the ward but a “useless annoyance.”29 Many shared S. G.’s sentiments; it was commonly believed that working in a hospital would coarsen even the most refined woman. As one surgeon in Alexandria told Harriet Dada, “A lady ceases to be a lady when she becomes a nurse.”30