A British Nurse's experiences working on the Belgian Front during the First World War

The chief nurse of the Union Hospital in Washington, D.C., describes life and stress in the hospital and comments on notable persons of power. Her heretofore unpublished diary and letters comprise a fresh, hightly significan document concerning the medical history of the Civil War and the contributions of women nurses in the Northern military hospitals. This book is edited, with Introduction and Commentary, by John R. Brumgardt. Published by The University of Tennessee. 150 pages

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. 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 coworker Isabella Fogg erupted almost immediately over issues of propriety. 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 edition includes an extensive introduction by the editor, transcriptions of relevant letters and newspaper articles, and a comprehensive biographical dictionary of the people mentioned in the diary.

March 25, 2020 When I walk through the automatic doors into the ICU at 7 AM, I step into a war zone. There are overflowing trash buckets and debris scattered all over the unit. Four red crash carts are outside the rooms, their drawers open and largely empty, witnesses to the chaotic night. One of the patients who coded survived, the three others died. One body in a white plastic shroud is still in a room on theb ed waiting for a stretcher. So opens the personal diary of Nurse T. She is one of the thousands of health care workers in New York City who covered their twelve hour shifts day after day as the Covid-19 virus raged through the city. Her account is personal, poitnant and poetic as she documents the suffering of the poor, largely immigrant patients who flooded the facility seeking treatment. It is also the story of a city, state and federal government that long denied hospitals like hers the funding and support they need to meet current standards. Long starved for funds, the facility's ancient infrasturure and inadequate supplies placed a heavy burden on the staff, who nonetheless walked up the marble stairs all through the crisis and gave their best, whatever the personal cost, whatever the outcome.

The diary of a nurse who served with the Canadian Army Medical Corps in France during the First World War.