BICENTENNIAL LECTURER: CIVIL WAR HELPED ELEVATE NURSING PROFESSION

Florence Nightingale is regarded as the founder of modern nursing, but nursing historian Barbra Wall says the Civil War gave birth to the profession.

Several hospitals located in Cairo and another in Mound City were battlefields where nurses and doctors fought infections and the malaria, typhoid and children's diseases that took many soldiers' lives.

About 80 people came to Crisp Hall at Southeast Missouri State University Tuesday night to hear Wall's Bicentennial Lecture titled "Civil War Nursing on the Mississippi."

An associate professor of nursing at St. Mary's College at Notre Dame, Ind., Wall is beginning doctoral work in history. She has researched the considerable role the college's Sisters of the Holy Cross played in nursing the war wounded.

Eighty of the sisters served as nurses in Illinois, Kentucky, Tennessee and Washington, D.C., during the war. Many physicians preferred nuns, Wall said, because they were obedient.

Hospitals were few prior to the Civil War, Wall said, and nursing usually was practiced in the home. Most of the 10,000 women who worked as nurses during the war learned under the press of events.

As many Civil War-era movies have vividly depicted, the hospital scenes were gruesome at times.

"Amputation was the cure for everything, they thought," Wall said.

Anesthetics did exist but not every doctor used them.

"Hospitals were dreaded by the men," Wall said.

One Catholic sister said some of the wards at her hospital "resembled a slaughterhouse."

At the time, infection was thought to be caused by noxious contaminants in the atmosphere. "Florence Nightingale didn't believe in the germ theory," Wall said.

About one-fourth of the war-related deaths of the day resulted from typhoid, Wall said.

In the absence of today's technologies the nurses pursued healing through cleanliness and caring behaviors the basics of touching and distracting, Wall said.

Two nurses, Mary Safford and Mary Ann Bickerdyke, became famous among the soldiers. Sofford was known at "The Angel of Cairo," while the strong-willed Bickerdyke was known to the men as "Mother."

Cape Girardeau played a part in the history of Civil War nursing. The Northern hospital ship Red Rover was built here in 1859. Originally a Southern barrack's ship, the Red Rover was captured in 1862 near New Madrid and then converted into a floating hospital based in Cairo.

"It was the first of its kind in the U.S. Navy and the best-equipped," Wall said.

The Red Rover had an elevator, two "water closets" on each deck, two kitchens and an amputation room.

But the working conditions for the nurses were far from good. Each had 60-80 patients, Wall said.

But of the 2,500 soldiers cared for on the Red Rover during the war, only 157 died.

Among the ship's nurses were African-American women. Wall said Harriet Tubman, who achieved fame for her Underground Railroad bravery, and abolitionist Sojourner Truth also were nurses during the Civil War. A writer named Walt Whitman was a Civil War nurse as well.

"The historical war heroes were not limited to soldiers," Wall said.