If the thing should happen again of one of the patients brought here to recover, and you allowed the steward to throw him into that place, I should run for help. Why? Because I am a mother, and I have only to remember that each of these sick ones (has) a mother somewhere, and for the time, I act for them.
In fact, the wounded and sick soldiers reminded Hannah of her own son, Ned, who was a soldier in the Union army. Hannah worried about him constantly, and so did her daughter, Alice. Alice told Ned that if he got sick or hurt, to make sure he was taken to the Union Hospital so their mother could care for him.
“I wrote you all about her going,” Alice wrote to her brother. “But suppose you have not received the letter. She likes the work very much and is doing a great deal of good.”
Even though she had found her calling, Hannah discouraged Alice from visiting her at the hospital. “Now, it would not do for you to be here,” she informed her daughter. “It is no place for young girls. The surgeons are young and look upon nurses as their natural prey.… Wounded men are exposed from head to foot before the nurses and they object to anybody but an ‘old mother.’ This is not all. I don’t like the tone of anything here. Refinement is not the order of society [of the hospital].”
REFINEMENT AT the Union Hotel was a thing of the past, which was evident when Lu walked into the ballroom on her first day. The once-glamorous room, noted for its Pompeian style mural, had been a destination for fancy balls, including one held in honor of George Washington. But the ballroom was now partitioned into patient wards containing iron beds lined up in neat rows and occupied with wounded and sick men from the Battle of Antietam and the Second Battle of Bull Run. Although the men had survived the battlefield, they now had to survive their stay at the hospital.
“The healing process is very slow,” Hannah explained. “When they first come they appear to gain because we feed them and tend so well their wounds, but soon the suppuration takes place, lead has to be probed for, and then they get sad and lose their appetite.”
Germ theory was not yet accepted in 1862. Although viruses and bacteria had been seen under a microscope, they were interpreted as part of the healing process, so doctors and nurses weren’t aware that sterile conditions should be provided and maintained. However, it had also been observed, during the Revolutionary War, that wounded patients seemed to have a better chance of recovery if the hospital was uncrowded, clean, and well ventilated.
The first thing Lu noticed when she walked into the patient ward was the overpowering stench from the festering wounds and infection. The early rays of sun peeked through the closed windows while Lu watched a wounded man die. Afterward, she sat down on a hard chair and watched over a boy with pneumonia and a man who had been shot through the lungs. “I sat looking at the twenty strong faces as they looked back at me… hoping that I looked ‘motherly’ to them; for my thirty years made me feel old, and the suffering round me made me long to comfort every one,” Lu later confided in her journal. The man with the chest wound just stared at Lu, not saying a word, and this made her nervous. When the boy sat up, gasping for breath, Lu placed her mother’s little black shawl around his shoulders. He smiled at her and said, “You are real motherly, ma’am.”
During the rest of her first day, she washed faces, served meals, and distributed medicine prescribed by Dr. George Stipp, who was the newly appointed chief. Considered a skilled surgeon (and a friend of President Lincoln’s), Stipp was inclined to prescribe calomel, a medicine containing mercury, no matter what the ailment, believing it to be a cure-all. And, because more than half of the deaths at the hospital were caused not by gunshot wounds but by diseases such as typhoid, typhus, malaria, pneumonia, and smallpox, he was prescribing a great deal of calomel, which, like most medicines at the time, was useless and even harmful. Everyone, including Lu, was at risk.
“We get lousy! and dirty,” Hannah wrote. “We run the gauntlet of disease from the disgusting itch to smallpox! My needle woman found nine body lice inside her flannel waistcoat after mending the clothes that had been washed! And I caught two inside the binding of my drawers!”
Looking around the decrepit ballroom, which had once been filled with music, dancing, and laughter, Lu noted that she was surrounded by “pneumonia on one side, diphtheria on the other, [and] five typhoids on the opposite.” She knew that although she wasn’t in the line of fire, she had the same chance of dying as the soldiers from the spread of disease. Even so, Lu worked from dawn until nine o’clock that night in a whirlwind of constant activity. “A strange day, but I did my best,” Lu wrote. She would think of the Union Hotel Hospital as the “Hurly-Burly House.”
Hannah was impressed with Lu’s first day on the job: “We are cheered by the arrival of Miss Alcott from Concord—the prospect of a really good nurse, a gentlewoman who can do more than merely keep the patients from falling out of bed.”
THREE DAYS later, on December 17, the wind was howling, and the rain was beating against the broken window when Lu was startled awake by a thundering knock on her door. “They’ve come, they’ve come!” someone was shouting.
Lu bolted upright in her bed. “Who have come?” she asked. “The rebels?”
“It’s the wounded from Fredericksburg.” Lu was told that she had fifteen minutes to get to the ballroom where the worst cases would be. “I am free to confess,” Lu wrote, “that I had a realizing sense of the fact that my hospital bed was not a bed of roses just then.” She sprang out of bed and hurried to the broken window, pulling the bedsheet-curtain back and looking out into the gray dawn light. She saw what looked like horse-drawn market carts lined up on the muddy street and watched them being unloaded until she realized they were ambulances filled with wounded soldiers. “My ardor experienced a sudden chill. And I indulged in a most unpatriotic wish that I was safe at home again.”
Despite her misgivings, Lu quickly put on her dress, tied her pinafore, pinned up her long hair before covering it with a red scarf that identified her as a nurse, and slipped on her shoes. She made her way down the stairs and entered the main hall. Along with the din of clamoring voices and clattering footsteps, Lu was greeted with a sickening odor that hung in the air like a thick fog. The stench was overpowering, and Lu’s only defense was arming herself with lavender water. She sprinkled some on her face, and, when that didn’t work, she held the bottle under her nose.
Lu tried not to get in the way as the wounded men streamed into the crowded hospital. Some were on stretchers, some were being carried in other men’s arms, and some were hobbling on makeshift crutches. “The hall was full of these wrecks of humanity,” Lu wrote. “For the most exhausted could not reach a bed until duly ticketed, and registered; the walls were lined with rows of such as could sit, the floors covered with the more disabled.”
Lu was surprised when the other nurses told her that these weren’t even the worst cases. The more severely wounded were to arrive in a few days. After the fight at Fredericksburg, the fallen soldiers had been left on the battlefield for two nights while the enemy continued to fire their weapons, preventing anyone from helping them. The dead had been hastily buried where they fell. “The wounded are brought in, for the most part, over corduroy roads,” one Union Hotel Hospital nurse wrote. “The suffering is indescribable. Often they are not able to keep to the direct road, but go first in one direction, then in another to escape the fire of guerillas [sic].”
Lu was overcome with emotion, but she quickly collected herself. “The sight of several stretchers, each with its legless, armless or desperately wounded occupant, entering the ward, admonished me that I was there to work, not to wonder or weep,” Lu wrote. “So I corked up my feelings, and returned to the path of duty, which was rather ‘a hard road to travel’ just then.” She took refuge behind some piles of clean shirts, socks, and bandages while she looked around the room. The wounded men, who were brought in from battle “with their clothes all on just as they were shot down,” were covered with mud to their knees and wrapped
with bloody bandages that hadn’t been changed in days. She noticed that every one of them wore a look of defeat on his face. “I pitied them so much, I dared not speak to them, though remembering all they had been through… I yearned to serve the dreariest of them,” Lu recalled.
Suddenly, she was yanked from her refuge by Julia Kendall, a nurse no “bigger than a pound of soap after a week’s washing,” who handed her a washtub, sponge, towels, and bar of brown soap. “Wash as fast as you can,” Julia told Lu. “Tell them to take off socks, coats and shirts, scrub them well, put on clean shirts, and the attendants will finish them off, and lay them in bed.” The men had to be bathed and checked for lice before they were assigned a bed.
Lu was shocked. “If she had requested me to shave them all, or dance a hornpipe on the stove funnel, I should have been less staggered.” But she again “corked up” her feelings of apprehension and proceeded to do as Julia told her. “If I had come expecting to enjoy myself,” Lu wrote to Hannah Stevenson, who was on furlough, “I should have paraded home again… as an all pervading bewilderment fell upon me the first few days, & when Miss Kendall calmly asked me to wash and put clean clothes on some eight or ten dreary faced, dirty & wounded men… I felt that the climax was reached & proceeded to do it very much as I should have attempted to cut off arms or legs if ordered to. Having no brothers & a womanly man for a father I find myself rather staggered… but… I still hope to get used to it & hold myself ‘ready for a spring if anything turns up.’”
Lu held on tightly to the soap while she scanned the room. She noticed an older soldier with a bloody bandage around his head. His pants, socks, and shoes were plastered with thick mud. Lu offered to wash him. “He was so overpowered by the honor of having a lady wash him, as he expressed it, that he did nothing but roll up his eyes, and bless me, in an irresistible style which was too much for my sense of the ludicrous; so we laughed together,” Lu noted.
When his clothes were set aside, they formed a mound of mud and would have to be taken to a small house out back and laundered in the clothes-boiler, a fifty-gallon cauldron attached to a furnace. In the meantime, Lu washed him and several others. “I took heart and scrubbed away like any tidy parent on a Saturday night. Some of them took the performance like sleepy children, leaning their tired heads against me as I worked, others looked grimly scandalized, and several of the roughest colored like bashful girls,” Lu remembered.
One of her first patients was First Sergeant Robert Bain. Born in Scotland, nineteen-year-old Robert was living in Detroit and working as a salesman when he joined the Twenty-Fourth Michigan Infantry four months earlier. When General McClellan observed their relentlessness in combat, he exclaimed, “They must be made of iron!” earning them their nickname, the “Iron Brigade.” The Iron Brigade also stood out for their choice of hat. Instead of wearing the usual kepi, a cap with a flat top and small brim, they wore a flat-top cowboy hat, known as a Hardee, and decorated it with a single ostrich feather. Their distinctive headgear combined with their iron-willed fighting provoked the Confederate soldiers to nickname them “Those damn Black Hats!”
Fredericksburg was Robert’s first battle, and it was going to be his last. His arm had been shot off, but he was luckier than some of his comrades. In his regiment alone, four soldiers’ heads were blown off. One was his captain’s eighteen-year-old son. Grief flooded everyone’s hearts when the captain desperately searched the battlefield for his son’s head so that it could be buried with his body. While Lu washed Robert, she noticed the peach fuzz mustache on his upper lip quivered, but he tried to smile bravely. “The little Sergeant was merry as if his afflictions were not worth lamenting over,” Lu wrote. But he wasn’t happy when his curly brown hair was shorn, and he would not let anyone shave his peach fuzz, which he proudly called his beard. Robert was given a clean shirt, underwear, and socks, each marked “U.S. Hosp. Dept.”
Lu looked at him with concern as he lay on his bed with his maimed right arm. “Now don’t you fret yourself about me, miss,” Robert said to her. “I’m first rate here, for it’s nuts to lie still on this bed, after knocking about in those confounded ambulances that shake what there is left of a fellow to jelly. I never was in one of these places before, and think this cleaning up a jolly thing for us, though I’m afraid it isn’t for you ladies.”
Not long after her interaction with Robert, Lu learned there was a captured Confederate soldier among the wounded. He’d been shot in the foot, and his leg would have to be amputated. “Being a red-hot Abolitionist,” Lu wrote, “[I] stared fixedly at the tall rebel, who was a copperhead, in every sense of the word [this was also a term for someone in the North who sympathizes with the South], and privately resolved to put soap in his eyes, rub his nose the wrong way, and excoriate his cuticle generally, if I had the washing of him.” Although she didn’t like him either, Hannah treated him just as well as all the other patients. When Lu approached him, she followed Hannah’s lead and pushed her feelings aside. “Shall I try to make you more comfortable, sir?” she asked politely.
“No, I’ll do it myself,” he replied gruffly.
So much for Southern chivalry, Lu thought. She dropped the washtub at his feet, leaving him to it. She resolved to ignore his existence from then on.
At 12:30 P.M., she helped deliver lunch to the men. A pint and a half of soup was served with meat, two slices of bread, and coffee with sugar and milk. Special attention was given to making sure the coffee was served hot, so it tasted better and kept their spirits up. When Lu noticed that one man hadn’t touched his meal, she offered to feed him.
“Thank you, ma’am,” he said to her. “I don’t think I’ll ever eat again, for I’m shot in the stomach. But I’d like a drink of water.”
Lu rushed to get him a glass of water, but the water pails had been taken to get refilled. As soon as they were returned, she immediately filled a mug and hurried over to his bed. She noticed that her patient had gone still during the wait. His face was pallid. She leaned down to listen for his breath and touched his forehead. It was cold. She realized he was dead. “I laid a sheet over the quiet sleeper, whom no noise could now disturb,” she recorded. “And half an hour later, the bed was empty. It seemed a poor requital for all he had sacrificed and suffered,—that hospital bed, lonely even in a crowd; for there was no familiar face for him to look his last upon; no friendly voice to say, Good bye; no hand to lead him gently down into the Valley of the Shadow; and he vanished like a drop in that red sea upon whose shores so many women stand lamenting.”
In the afternoon, Lu accompanied a doctor named Fitzpatrick on his rounds, carrying a tray of rolled lint, packed lint, roller bandages, plaster strips, ligatures, a pincushion with threaded needles, surgical instruments, towels, and sponges. Dr. Fitzpatrick was a tall, handsome Englishman who was very polite. Lu noticed that his hands trembled, but it wasn’t from fear. She didn’t mention the alcohol on his breath; however, she did reveal that the worse the injury, the more he seemed to like it. “He… seemed to regard a dilapidated body very much as I should have regarded a damaged garment… cutting, sawing, patching and piecing with the enthusiasm of an accomplished surgical seamstress; explaining the process, in scientific terms, to the patient,” Lu wrote.
The amputations were scheduled for the next day. In the meantime, Dr. Fitzpatrick examined injuries and performed small surgeries while Lu received her first lesson in dressing a wound. She thought that the doctor wasn’t very gentle with his patients, regarding them more as scientific specimens. “He had a way of twitching off a bandage, and giving a limb a comprehensive sort of clutch, which, though no doubt entirely scientific, was rather startling than soothing, and highly objectionable as a means of preparing nerves for any fresh trial,” Lu observed. “He also expected the patient to assist in small operations, as he considered them, and to restrain all demonstrations [screams] during the process.”
On this particular day’s rounds, Dr. Fitzpatrick didn’t think anesthesia was necessary
. (The two options at the time were either chloroform or ether. Ether was less likely to kill the patient, but, unlike chloroform, it was slow acting and smelled so bad that patients often resisted and gagged.) “The poor souls had to bear their pains as best they might.… [S]carcely a cry escaped them, though I longed to groan for them,” Lu wrote. Lu watched while Dr. Fitzpatrick poked about the bone fragments and exposed muscle in a patient’s gunshot wound. It was typical for doctors to insert their bare fingers into a wound, especially when searching for a bullet, then using either bullet forceps or a bullet scoop to remove it and any other foreign matter. The soldier tried to suppress a cry but was so overwhelmed by the pain that he fainted. This didn’t stop Fitzpatrick, who instructed Lu, “Be so good as to hold this till I finish.” She followed his orders but had “a strong desire to insinuate a few of his own disagreeable knives and scissors into him, and see how he liked it.” They dressed the wound with a piece of lint moistened with water and covered with oiled silk. Later, Fitzpatrick would check for the formation of pus, which he unfortunately took as a sign that the wound was healing. He also needed to check for gangrene and maggots.
The fetid smell combined with opened windows attracted flies that would lay their eggs in the soldiers’ wounds, resulting in maggots. This was especially problematic when wounded soldiers were left on the battlefield for days on end in warm weather. One nurse reported that a soldier’s arm “was so mortified that the flesh dropped off and as many as a pint of maggots were got out. It is impossible to keep maggots from some wounds for they multiply in less than a minute.”
One surgeon noted that the best defense against them was keeping the wound clean, and that a solution of camphor oil was considered an excellent remedy. “It seems… the maggot actually does damage in a wound,” he reported. “Although not by attacking the living tissues, but only by the annoyance created by the continual sensation of crawling and irritation which it occasions, and of which the patient often complains bitterly.”
Louisa on the Front Lines Page 8