Through a Nurse’s Perspective Denise Xylia Lagua History 4710-05 Dr. Francois April 26, 2014 In Civil War Hospital Sketches, Louisa May Alcott presented her six-week experience as a volunteered nurse during the American Civil War. She gave herself an alias: Nurse Tribulation Periwinkle. Throughout the story, there were three concise “sketches” that portrayed her experience. The first sketch was about her decision to become a nurse, evading other suggestions by her family such as writing a book, teaching, and getting married. The second sketch was about her nursing job and how she took care and treated wounded American soldiers in the hospital. Her last sketch described when she contracted a serious illness from nursing and was forced and brought back home by her father. In chapter four, A Night, John, who was a young blacksmith, a soldier, and one of Periwinkle’s dying patients, affected her the most during her experience as a nurse. Alcott’s diction and imagery about John served to inform her audience’s understanding of the Civil War. Throug...
This novel, A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, is based on Ballard’s diary starting in 1785 and ending with her death in 1812. Ulrich takes us step by step through Martha Ballard’s life as a Colonial Midwife. She reveals to us all the marvelous acts that midwives performed for their families and communities. “Midwives and nurses mediated the mysteries of birth, procreation, illness and death. They touched the untouchable, handled excrement and vomit as well as milk, swaddled the dead as well as the newborn” (Ulrich, 1990, pg.47). The novel also reveals that based on the views of societal power, gender roles in the medical environment and personal values, revealed in the diary, women were subordinate to men during this historical time period. Martha Ballard lived and thrived in this inferior atmosphere.
As he immerses his audience into combat with the soldiers, Shaara demonstrates the more emotional aspects of war by highlighting the personal lives of the men fighting. For example, when Shaara reveals the pasts of James Longstreet and Lewis Armistead’s, I started to picture them as the men that they were and not as soldiers out for blood. After suffering a devastating loss of three of his children to fever, Longstreet is tossed into battle. In Armistead’s case, he not only suffered the loss of his wife, but also of a friend fighting on the Union side, General Winfield Scott Hancock. Shaara saves his readers a front row seat to the inner turmoil of General Chamberlain regarding his hindering duty as a soldier clashes with his duty to family as he strived to serve the Union as well as protec...
In the nineteenth century domestic, maternal women were considered the ideal. Several authors challenged this ideal while others glorified it and showed it as completely pragmatic. After all, who better to raise and feed the family than the one who is responsible for giving life to them? Louisa May Alcott shows her primary female figure in Transcendental Wild Oats, Hope Lamb, in a strong traditional female role. Hope is arguably the strongest character in the story and serves as an alternative to the typical modern feminist society promotes today. In Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Blithedale Romance, Zenobia is the heroine who to a great extend runs the commune. She is bold physically, spiritually and intellectually. She is very much different from Hope Lamb, but in many crucial ways, they are all too similar.
Brockenbrough, Judith White, Diary of a Southern Refugee, During the War, The American Civil War: Letters and Diaries. Richmond: Randolph and English (1889): 174.
In Margaret Edson’s play Wit, a cancer patient promoted her end of life decision to her primary nurse rather than her supervisor doctor, and asks her primary nurse to take care of her till death. For result, there was one huge fighting between Vivian’s primary nurse Susie and doctor Jason when her heart stop beats.
Pat Barker's riveting World War I novel Regeneration brilliantly exemplifies the effectiveness of fiction united with historical facts. While men aspired to gain glory from war and become heroes, Regeneration poignantly points out that not all of war was glorious. Rather, young soldiers found their aspirations prematurely aborted due to their bitter war experiences. The horrible mental and physical sicknesses, which plagued a number of soldiers, caused many men to withdraw from the battlefield. Feelings of guilt and shame haunted many soldiers as they found themselves removed from the heat of war. Men, however, were not the only individuals to experience such feelings during a time of historical upheaval. Women, too, found themselves at war at the dawn of a feminine revolution. One of the most contentious topics of the time was the practice of abortion, which comes to attention in chapter 17 on pages 202 and 203 of Barker's novel. Through Baker's ground-breaking novel, we learn how men and women alike discovered that in life, not all aspirations are realized; in fact, in times of conflict, women and men both face desperate situations, which have no definite solutions. Illustrated in Barker's novel by a young woman named Betty, and many broken soldiers, society's harsh judgments worsen the difficult circumstances already at hand.
Emily Dickinson’s response to the Civil War was once discounted as nonexistent, but in the last few decades her works have been added to the Civil War canon. The previous belief that Dickinson’s poetry was not influenced by the Civil War is preposterous given that her most successful years as a poet coincided with the Civil War. Like any American during the war, she too experienced loss when a person from her childhood had been killed in a battle, and she kept her correspondence with Thomas Wentworth Higginson throughout the war. No American was left unscathed; the war had influenced the country in many different ways – political, personal, and literary. This is why it would be the most logical to assume Dickinson had written about the Civil
The Civil War, which lasted for four long years, was a “total war” involving every aspect of society. During this time in one of the bloodiest of wars, northern and southern women were as equally involved as their male counterparts, if not more. Because of this war, women were forced to abandon their traditional roles of the 19th century, and participate in the war effort. Some fearless women disguised themselves as young men, and took on the role of soldiers, in order to show their patriotism. Some of the more cunning women freelanced as spies outside the government sphere, so that they could participate in the war. Others supported the war effort by taking on the roles of nurses who risked their lives on the battlefield; however, most of them worked in hospitals located in the rear. No matter how big or small the role they played during the civil war, the significance of their effort and support broadened beliefs about the abilities of women and what they could achieve outside of the home.
Brackman, in “Civil War Women: Their Quilts, their Roles, Activities for Re-Enactors,” tells the stories of nurses, refugees, civilians, and spies during the Civil War. Bold stories of women who are taking care of children and wounded soldiers having to flee their burning homes to save their families. The horror of hospital work with seeing many men dying in agony from battle wounds that are infect by maggots and disease. There is a story that a woman named Georgeanna Woosley made up a costume for women nurses that were not used in the hospitals. Sarah Hill notes on a ship that she saw this costume and knew from the hat and hoop skirt that Woosley was not a nurse.
Sarah Benjamin went before the deposition on the twentieth day of November, 1837 in the Court of Common Pleas of Wayne County, Pennsylvania. This deposition intended to validate claims for receiving pension benefits owed to Mrs. Benjamin from a previous marriage; an Aaron Osborn, veteran of the Revolutionary War. Her case founded itself on the numerous acts of Congress over the previous decade--in particular the Comprehensive Pension Act of 1832 and subsequent acts of Congress from July 4, 1836 and March 3, 1837--allowing for the first time yearly grants to all who served in the Continental Army for a period of six months or more. These acts supplanted Sarah Benjamin's case because applicants no longer required disability or monetary status for approval, as well as allowing widows married at the time of the war to be eligible for full payments1. While the history of Revolutionary War pensions is quite rich and intriguing, what is most enriching over the course of the study of this document is the incredibly vivid and accurate account of life in Continental Army camps Mrs. Benjamin–known as Sarah Osborn during this period of time and henceforth in this study-deposes. Through the study of this document, with the aid of works giving accounts and the significance of other women involved in the Revolution, this work will attempt to present a well-rounded and complete picture of life during wartime can be achieved. Not only is Sarah Osborn's deposition a wonderfully personal and astoundingly accurate story, it remains as one of the best known accounts of a woman living with soldiers in the camps. The efforts she underwent to help keep them fed, clean, organized, and together alone astound as feats of remarkable courage and devotion. Sa...
In 1830, at the age of 70, Martin published his diaries, under the title “A Narrative of Some of the Adventures, Dangers and Sufferings of a Revolutionary Soldier, Interspersed with Anecdotes of Incidents that Occurred Within His Own Observation.” Published anonymously, as was customary at the time, the book sold poorly, and was largely forgotten by the time Martin died in 1850. More than a century later, however, the work was rediscovered and republished as “Private Yankee Doodle.” Though Martin’s account was often exaggerated and embellished (at times he recounted events he could not possibly have witnessed firsthand or improved the outcomes of incidents), it stands as the most graphic, vivid and detailed first-person account of the life of a Continental soldier during the American Revolution.
The author, Elizabeth Brown Pryor, wrote her biography of Clara Barton with the intent to not only tell her life, but to use personal items (diary and letters) of Clara’s found to help fill information of how Clara felt herself about incidents in her life. Her writing style is one that is easy to understand and also one that enables you to actually get pulled into the story of the person. While other biographical books are simply dry facts, this book, with the help of new found documents, allows Pryor to give a modern look on Barton’s life. This book gave a lot of information about Ms. Barton while also opening up new doors to the real Clara Barton that was not always the angel we hear about. Pryor’s admiration for Ms. Barton is clear in her writing, but she doesn’t see her faults as being a bad thing, but rather as a person who used all available means to help her fellow soldiers and friends along in life.
The story of “Life in the Iron Mills” enters around Hugh Wolfe, a mill hand whose difference from his faceless, machine-like colleagues is established even before Hugh himself makes an appearance. The main narrative begins, not with Hugh, but with his cousin Deborah; the third-person point of view allows the reader to see Deborah in an apparently objective light as she stumbles tiredly home from work in the cotton mills at eleven at night. The description of this woman reveals that she does not drink as her fellow cotton pickers do, and conjectures that “perhaps the weak, flaccid wretch had some stimulant in her pale life to keep her up, some love or hope, it might be, or urgent need” (5). Deborah is described as “flaccid,” a word that connotes both limpness and impotence, suggesting that she is not only worn out, but also powerless to change her situation; meanwhile, her life is “pale” and without the vivid moments we all desire. Yet even this “wretch” has something to sti...
Who was Louisa May Alcott? Alcott was a nineteenth century author who wrote numerous famous books, such as the book series Little Women. However, Alcott did not start out famous. As a child, Alcott’s family lived in poverty. Though her family lived in poverty, Alcott had an extremely vivid imagination, especially for a girl during the time period that she lived in. Even when she was young, Alcott’s biggest dream was to become a famous author. She wrote one of her first poems at the age of eight when she saw a robin. With the money she made from her works, Alcott hoped to someday be able to pull her family out of poverty. Alcott was an extremely determined woman who used her determination to help her family rise out of poverty, and also accomplished many of her other goals in life.
Caring for people is a prerequisite for becoming a nurse. This can often be effortless and second nature but then there are other times where caring for someone is not always the easiest thing to do. You see it in the frustrated mom of the two-year-old who is throwing a temper tantrum in Target. Or the nurse of a patient who presses his call light frequently for seemingly insignificant things. Caring takes patience. With nursing, in particular, you need to feel called to the profession. You need to feel as though nursing is something you desperately have to do. As if you would be disobeying or cheating if you did not become a nurse. This calling can come from many different places or people, but for me, it comes from the Holy Spirit. Throughout my life, I would get so excited going to the doctor’s office or the hospital. I longed to stay and discover parts of the hospital I had not had the pleasure of finding yet. I felt called to