This Birth Place of Souls

Erscheinungsjahr 2013
ISBN: 978-0-19-539268-5
Verlag: ACADEMIC

Buch, Englisch, 352 Seiten, Format (B × H): 161 mm x 240 mm, Gewicht: 605 g

After the battle of Antietam in 1862, Harriet Eaton traveled to Virginia from her home in Portland, Maine, to care for soldiers in the Army of the Potomac. Portland's Free Street Baptist Church, with liberal ties to abolition, established the Maine Camp Hospital Association and made the widowed Eaton its relief agent in the field. One of many Christians who believed that patriotic activism could redeem the nation, Eaton quickly learned that war was no respecter of
religious principles.

Doing the work of nurse and provisioner, Eaton tended wounded men and those with smallpox and diphtheria during two tours of duty. She preferred the first tour, which ended after the battle of Chancellorsville in 1863, to the second, more sedentary, assignment at City Point, Virginia, in 1864. There the impositions of federal bureaucracy standardized patient care at the expense of more direct communication with soldiers. Eaton deplored the arrogance of U.S. Sanitary Commissioners whom she
believed saw state benevolent groups as competitors for supplies.

Eaton struggled with the disruptions of transience, scarcely sleeping in the same place twice, but found the politics of daily toil even more challenging. Conflict between Eaton and co-worker Isabella Fogg erupted almost immediately over issues of propriety; the souring working conditions leading to Fogg's ouster from Maine state relief efforts by late 1863. Though Eaton praised some of the surgeons with whom she worked, she labeled others charlatans whose neglect had deadly implications for
the rank and file. If she saw villainy, she also saw opportunities to convert soldiers and developed an intense spiritual connection with a private, which appears to have led to a postwar liaison.

Published here for the first time, the uncensored nursing diary is a rarity among medical accounts of the war, showing Eaton to be an astute observer of human nature and not as straight-laced as we might have thought. This hardcover edition includes an extensive introduction from the editor, transcriptions of relevant letters and newspaper articles, and a thoroughly researched biographical dictionary of the people mentioned in the diary.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Schultz

Schultz, Jane E.

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Geschichtliche Themen Mentalitäts- und Sozialgeschichte
• Medizin | Veterinärmedizin Medizin | Public Health | Pharmazie | Zahnmedizin Medizin, Gesundheitswesen Geschichte der Medizin
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Weltgeschichte & Geschichte einzelner Länder und Gebietsräume Geschichte einzelner Länder Amerikanische Geschichte
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Geschichtliche Themen Militärgeschichte

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Introduction
The Diary
1862: 6 October to 31 December
1863: 1 January to 12 May
1864: 12 October to 24 December
Notes
Appendixes
Transcriptions of Letters and Newspaper Items
Biographical Dictionary
Bibliography
Index

Über Autor(innen)

Professor of English and Director of Literature, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis; author, Women at the Front: Female Hospital Workers in Civil War America (UNC Press, 2004; Honorable Mention for the 2005 Lincoln Prize) and Blood, Lead, and Ink: A Concise History of Civil War Medicine (Praeger, forthcoming)