Abstract
In this study the personal life and professional career of Zsuzsanna Kossuth, the youngest sister of Lajos Kossuth, is discussed based on primary and secondary sources with special emphasis on her physical and emotional journey into exile, where she was surrounded by both Hungarian emigrés and American intellectuals. By the time she arrived in the United States in 1853, her personal life had been full of ups and downs: she had lost her husband and baby son within a year of each other, spent months in prison twice and had become sick, with only a cough initially, then pneumonia and finally “pulmonary affections.” In spite of the many setbacks she suffered, Kossuth also stands apart for the unusual reason that she had a career: in April, 1849, during the Hungarian War of Independence, she was appointed the Chief Nurse of camp hospitals. Although she has not become as famous as Florence Nightingale, viewed as the founder of modern nursing, Zsuzsanna Kossuth organized seventy-two camp hospitals and a network of volunteer nurses five years previous to the Crimean War. The year 2017 was dedicated in Hungary to her memory commemorating the bicentenary of her birth in particular and to the profession of nursing in general. Her legacy should be promoted globally.
Highlights
In this study the personal life and professional career of Zsuzsanna Kossuth, the youngest sister of Lajos Kossuth, is discussed based on primary and secondary sources with special emphasis on her physical and emotional journey into exile, where she was surrounded by both Hungarian emigrés and American intellectuals
One hundred and seventy-one years ago, on April 16, 1849, the Governor-President Lajos Kossuth appointed his youngest sister, Zsuzsanna, as the Chief Nurse of all military hospitals in Hungary for the rest of the War of Independence. It can only be imagined how unusual and unpopular this appointment seemed to the army generals: a lady, especially a relative of Hungary’s first statesman, was put in charge of the nursing division of the military and tasked with managing its network of volunteer nurses and inspecting the proper quantity and quality of health care equipment and supplies in hospitals
Such a thing was unheard of in a male-dominated society and especially in a male-dominated profession! Already a role model for nurses in Hungary, in 2017 the Hungarian Nursing Association devoted an entire memorial year to commemorating the bicentenary of Zsuzsanna Kossuth’s birth, the chief nurse of camp hospitals during the War of Independence of 1848/49, and Governor Lajos Kossuth’s fourth and youngest sister. (Out of the five Kossuth siblings, Zsuzsanna was eventually the youngest to die, but not the earliest, since her eldest sister Mrs István Breznay née Karolina Kossuth died at the age of thirty-eight in 1848.)
Summary
What sources are available for those wishing to learn about Zsuzsanna Kossuth’s life, thoughts, actions and struggles? Zsuzsanna was an ardent correspondent as was customary in the mid-nineteenth century, no diary appears to have been left for posterity. While the author may have been anonymous and unknown to Földes, Szabó and Kertész, both the journalist in 1880 and the librarian, historian, writer and poet, Ida Bobula (1900-1981), revealed her possible identity as that of Miss Elizabeth Palmer Peabody Bobula made this connection in an article published in the journal A Fáklya [‘The Torch’] (Bobula 1960), which is available in the Vasváry Collection in Szeged. Tom Angi (1991), who found documents in the Vasváry Collection to support these connections Mann “became a close friend and firm supporter of Lajos Kossuth and the Hungarian War of Independence He and his wife Mary Peabody Mann, a sister-in-law of Nathaniel Hawthorne, befriended Emília [Kossuth] and her sons through the intervention of Mary's sister, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, a leading transcendentalist and publisher of many famous American poets and writers.”
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