ded men. Many of these women scandalized their friends
at home by what seemed their Quixotic resolution; or, they left their
families under circumstances which involved a romantic oblivion of the
recognized and usual duties of domestic life; they forsook their own
children, to make children of a whole army corps; they risked their
lives in fevered hospitals; they lived in tents or slept in ambulance
wagons, for months together; they fell sick of fevers themselves, and
after long illness, returned to the old business of hospital and field
service. They carried into their work their womanly tenderness, their
copious sympathies, their great-hearted devotion--and had to face and
contend with the cold routine, the semi-savage professional
indifference, which by the necessities of the case, makes ordinary
medical supervision, in time of actual war, impersonal, official,
unsympathetic and abrupt. The honest, natural jealousy felt by
surgeons-in-charge, and their ward masters, of all outside assistance,
made it necessary for every woman, who was to succeed in her purpose of
holding her place, and really serving the men, to study and practice an
address, an adaptation and a patience, of which not one candidate in ten
was capable. Doubtless nine-tenths of all who wished to offer and
thought themselves capable of this service, failed in their practical
efforts. As many women fancied themselves capable of enduring hospital
life, as there are always in every college, youth who believe they can
become distinguished authors, poets and statesmen. But only the few who
had a _genius_ for the work, continued in it, and succeeded in elbowing
room for themselves through the never-ending obstacles, jealousies and
chagrins that beset the service. Every woman who keeps her place in a
general hospital, or a corps hospital, has to prove her title to be
trusted; her tact, discretion, endurance and strength of nerve and
fibre. No one woman succeeded in rendering years of hospital service,
who was not an exceptional person--a woman of larger heart, clearer
head, finer enthusiasm, and more mingled tact, courage, firmness and
holy will--than one in a thousand of her sex. A grander collection of
women--whether considered in their intellectual or their moral
qualities, their heads or their hearts, I have not had the happiness of
knowing, than the women I saw in the hospitals; they were the flower of
their sex. Great as were the labors of those who superi