I do not know who they are, nor have I time to learn.” April 17 finds her “going round as usual this morning, washing the faces of the men, and got half through with one before I found out that he was dead.” But she also expresses strong opinions, mostly in the form of her fierce loyalty to the Confederacy. She writes on April 16, 1862: “I daily witness the same sad scenes-men dying all around me. Kate’s journal entries are often, that is very often, as heartbreaking as one might imagine. She published the journal in 1866 as A Journal of Hospital Life in the Confederate Army of Tennessee from the Battle of Shiloh to the End of the War: with Sketches of Life and Character, and Brief Notices of Current Events During That Period. Kate began recording her activities and thoughts and describing hospitals and surrounding events from the time she was assigned her first post in Okolona, Mississippi in April 1862 until three years later when she was back in Mobile on May 29, 1865. She continued volunteering in various Confederate hospitals across the South and was eventually hired as a paid nurse. Kate was living in Mobile, Alabama in 1862 and heeded the call when the Reverend Benjamin Miller asked the ladies of the south to head to the front lines.
1828-1909) volunteered to serve the Confederacy first by caring for the soldiers wounded in the Battle of Shiloh.
#Civil war hospital diaries full#
How interesting to pick up a journal written almost 150 years ago and consider the writer, Kate Cumming, as a sort of blogger for her day - a southern woman in her thirties Twittering about what was happening daily in the hospitals full of wounded soldiers dying for The Lost Cause. The authors, who might once have seemed so ancient and odd with their stuffy language and constrictive clothing, appear more recognizable and less old-timey. Reading journals and letters from decades, even centuries ago, within the context of what we now understand as personal documentary lends a certain approachableness to those individuals writing about the events of their respective times. We make up-to-the-second information gathering a part of our everyday lives. With blogs, Facebook, Blackberries and the like, we have all become familiar with the immediacy provided by first-hand accounts and the intimate knowledge of events gained through the barely mediated musings of anyone with an Internet connection.
A Journal of Hospital Life in the Confederate Army of Tennessee From the Battle of Shiloh to the End of the War by Kate Cumming
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