![]() ![]() The medical practices of the private Robertson Hospital reflected Tompkins’s compassionate and meticulous dedication to cleanliness and care and its reputation began to spread. She ran a home-turned-hospital in Richmond. In the South, Captain Sally Louisa Tompkins, also known as the “Angel of the Confederacy,” became, at the age of 28, the first woman to be commissioned into the Confederate Army-also the first woman in American history to be formally inducted into the military. She took good care of her nurses, the women who were extremely critical to advancing the role of nursing in the war and in medicine overall. She was thought to have impossibly high standards for her nurses, but she continued to advocate for them to receive more formal training and increased work opportunities and responsibilities. ![]() As the first woman ever to serve at such a high level in a federally appointed position, she dove into the work, helping to set up field hospitals and aid stations. Read more: How Florence Nightingale Paved the Way for the Heroic Work of Nurses Todayĭix powered through a field of resistance and during the course of the war appointed and arranged for the training of more than 3,000 nurses. The war created a way for women to take an active role in the relief effort from outside of the home and family, assume leadership roles in sanitary commissions, provide clerical assistance in government and business, and provide invaluable services in caring for wounded soldiers. They were Catholic nuns, immigrants, formerly enslaved people, wives and daughters. More than 3,000 women acted as paid nurses and many thousands more worked as unpaid volunteers. It was true that most of the women probably had no prior experience with the kinds of devastating wounds and ailments the men were experiencing, but they were willing to learn and insistent on becoming part of the solution, arguing that the war “was as much a woman’s war as it was a man’s war.” The women of North and South pressed on in areas that had previously been closed to Victorian women, and it is estimated that more than 21,000 women served in Union military hospitals and a comparable number in the Confederacy, where 10% of the nursing women were African American. Southern tradition found the intimate physical contact of nursing to be highly inappropriate for women. The Union Army in particular was opposed to having women onsite, believing that they were inexperienced, incompetent, and disorganized. They were not always welcomed by doctors. They began to appear seemingly everywhere, in both cities and remote locations to provide care to wounded or sick soldiers. Newspaper reports about the lack of medical treatment and supplies in the army camps and hospitals inspired thousands of women to volunteer on the battlefields and hospitals. ![]() The number of wounded soldiers multiplied, and epidemic diseases ravaged the troops. An officer’s wife might accompany her husband to the battlefield, or a mother attend to care for a wounded son or husband, and either might choose to remain and care for the increasing number of wounded. The armies had no well-organized medical corps or field hospital plans. Arrangements had not been made for transporting or treating tens of thousands of wounded and sickened men. When the Civil War erupted, the governments of the divided country had not prepared for a lengthy and epic combat situation and its resulting casualties. By the end of the war, the term meant women who aided doctors by cleaning and feeding patients and occasionally assisting doctors in their surgeries and treatments.” “The idea of women handling the bodies of men not related by family was unthinkable. Hicks of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia explained. “At the beginning of the war, a ‘nurse’ meant a soldier recovering in hospital from a wound or injury, untrained in healing, who aided doctors with miscellaneous duties,” Dr. ![]()
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