Hired to Care: Civil War Nurses and the Military Body

Date: March 15, 2012
Time: 5:30 PM - 7:00 PM

“Hired to Care” explores women’s relief work during the American Civil War in its social, political, and medical contexts. Although the majority of surgeons and nurses identified themselves as elites, each group spoke of having established more intimate bonds with the working-class men under their care than with one another. At the bottom of the military hospital hierarchy, female nurses related easily to their charges who like them, experienced subordination as soldiers. While the events surrounding the war would bring dignity to middle-class women’s labor, volunteers who were able to work without wages compared themselves favorably to paid workers whose patriotic motives they questioned. Professor Schultz uses her analysis of the social demographics of military medical workers to explore the sites of personal conflict that inevitably arose in the theater of war, as well as the political implications of those struggles. The talk emphasizes interaction between the Union nursing and surgical corps, but it also addresses Confederate medical workers insofar as their experience was distinct from that of Union workers.

About the Speaker(s)

Jane E. Schultz is Professor of English and Director of Literature at Indiana University-Purdue University-Indianapolis (IUPUI), the urban medical campus of Indiana University. She comes to the medical humanities by way of an interest in narrative forms and the hospital as a site of social and political interaction. Women at the Front (University of North Carolina, 2004), her study of gender and relief work in Civil War military hospitals, was a finalist for the 2005 Lincoln Prize. In 2010 she published This Birth Place of Souls (Oxford UP), an annotated edition of one of the last extant nursing diaries from the Civil War. She is also the editor of Cancer Stories, a special issue of Literature and Medicine [29.2 (Fall 2009)] devoted to framing the field of critical cancer studies. A new project on Civil War medical history, Lead, Blood, and Ink, puts soldiers and the public health movement at the center of the story.

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