To Bind Up the Wounds: Catholic Sister Nurses in the Civil War (review)

Abstract

BOOK REVIEWS175 The reader encounters material from many writers—George Templeton Strong, Jane Grey Swisshelm, and Ralph Waldo Emerson being noteworthy among the many prominent figures. Newspaper editorials and an abundance of writings of soldiers—from privates to generals and their wives and relatives—compound the mixture. Could all of these people have been so much of one mind? To put the wonderment in other terms, individualism and related attributes, however much they may have thrilled an Emerson, may have laid comparatively little claim upon the unsophisticated. In this book an Indiana soldier at Antietam reflects that older persuasion nicely in claiming to have become '"a Victor over self" (43). The author here underscores the imperative nature of "self-command," "self-control," and "self-possession" (42), terms betokening what "self-government" had meant to most all along. This book aspires to much, perhaps too much, but it serves well in reminding a sometimes skeptical modernity of the significance of beliefs. It serves especially well in showing the crucial effect on attitudes of the firing on Fort Sumter (chapter two), and in treating the emergence of determination to see the bloody business through (chapter three). Though the particulars may arouse a question or two, the progression to a "modern definition" of self in the post-war years has plausibility. At book's end we have an inkling of our own presence: "The 'lonely crowd' waited just around the corner" (125). Lewis O. Saum University of Washington To Bind Up the Wounds: Catholic Sister Nurses in the Civil War. By Sister Mary Denis Maher. (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1989. Pp. x, 178. $39.95.) Sister Mary Denis Maher explores the activities of an important and long-neglected group of Civil War nurses: the more than six hundred Roman Catholic sisters representing twenty-one religious communities who nursed Union and Confederate soldiers during the Civil War. Noting that the sisters provided the only pool of trained nurses at the outbreak of the war, she demonstrates that these women were much in demand and often preferred over lay nurses. The author believes other factors besides experience recommended the sisters. Accustomed to following orders as members of religious communities , they were willing to work hard and already knew the rigors of living a spartan existence. More importantly, they looked upon nursing as a spiritual calling, not as menial work. Though never assigned to specific regiments, they did assist on transport ships, in tent hospitals, and in large urban medical facilities, performing a variety of tasks from 176CIVIL WAR HISTORY dressing wounds to assisting in amputations. Their willingness to perform the most medically dangerous work—nursing soldiers through epidemic diseases such as smallpox—and their willingness to take on tasks regarded by most as undesirable—preparing the dead for burial—endeared them to military commanders and common soldiers alike. Their work did not endear them to female lay nurses, a subject the author investigates in some detail. The legendary Dorothea Dix, who oversaw several thousand women in her role as Superintendent of Union army female nurses, disliked the sisters, resenting their independence of her authority, the preference some doctors showed for their services, and possibly their religion. This tension between religious and lay nurses was less apparent in the South, where female nurses were more of a rarity and where no government agency oversaw nursing activities. Drawing largely on the vast collections of archival material of the twelve religious orders which provided nurses, the author creates a profile of sister nurses. About one-fifth of all nuns in the United States labored in some type of nursing capacity, many serving for the duration of the war with or without pay. Of the total six hundred nurses, about half were of Irish descent, one hundred of French or German ancestry, and the remainder American born. The largest single order furnishing approximately one-third of all sister nurses was the Daughters of Charity, based in Emmitsburg, Maryland. Although the religious archives provided Sister Mary Denis Maher with a wealth of information about where and when the sisters nursed, these records not surprisingly shed little light on the activities or feelings of individual nurses. The limitations of this source...