The Nineteenth-Century Literature of Nursing
Session Coordinator: Jane E. Schultz
Dept. of English , Indiana Univ.-Purdue Univ.-Indianapolis
425 University Blvd. , Indianapolis, IN 46202
jschult@iupui.edu

Pragmatic Compassion: Walt Whitman’s Civil War Nursing

In 1863, the American poet Walt Whitman began a brief, intense career as a volunteer nurse and “wound dresser” in the Civil War hospitals in Washington. In the writings that issue from this period, Whitman responds to the suffering of the war by re-enacting the commonplace—both in practice and in writing—through daily, accumulating acts of care. Nursing and writing civilize forms of primary disorder in Whitman and hold patients in the world through commonplace acts of touch, attention, concentration, and voice--what contemporary hospice nurses call “caring for patients and for their non-abandonment.” This theory of nursing care—“pragmatic compassion” –is the subject of my presentation.

Robert Leigh Davis
Wittenberg University
rdavis@wittenberg.edu

"Getting the Bodies of my Boys in Order": Gender Construction and the Nursing Narrative in Louisa May Alcott’s Hospital Sketches

This paper views Louisa May Alcott’s Hospital Sketches (1863), a text based on Alcott’s own Civil War nursing experience, through the lens of genre. The form of the hospital sketch frees Alcott – as the hospital itself frees the woman nurse – to handle male bodies and male/ female physical contact without directly invoking male and female sexuality for herself or her nineteenth-century US readership. The hospital sketch positions the woman writer to consider culturally constructed, significantly desexualized notions of gender in ways prohibited by less clinical, and so potentially more sexualized, narrative forms. Alcott’s mix of fiction and her own experiences as seen in Hospital Sketches allowed her to elide (self-) examination of her sexuality. This intersection of gender and form frees Alcott to construct an alternative sex-gender identity for a white, middle-class woman in the nineteenth-century United States.

Laura Laffrado
Western Washington Univ.-Bellingham
Laura.Laffrado@wwu.edu

La Muse L’Amuse: Developing a Rhetoric of Care in Poetry about Nursing

Translated roughly as “the muse amuses her,” this paper examines nurses’ early attempts to speak poetically about work “in the trenches” of military hospitals. In the era before nursing was considered a profession, military nurses developed a rhetoric of care to give their work visibility and legitimacy. My research points to nurses’ development of a rhetoric of care that served as a foundational narrative for the new profession in the 1880s and 1890s. Civil War nurses wrote poems to transcend the materiality of their work, but did so for different reasons. For Davis, the nursing poem becomes a medium for restoring what patients have lost through trauma. “La Muse l’Amuse” regards the earlier part of this equation, where nurses wrote poems as acts of nationalism to celebrate martial valor, but also as acts of professional definition. Their poetic chronicle of serving the soldier’s body confirmed their belief that the work of nursing was integral to healing and should not be understood as marginal to the concerns of 19 th-century medicine.

Arguing that the personal service they provided mitigated the anonymity of wounding, nurse-poets like Clara Barton and Rose Terry Cooke penned verses that represented heroism in action as a parallel to soldiers in combat. While Whitman’s lyrics were central to the project of establishing a poetics of care in the post-Civil War era, the poems of lesser poets (and perhaps greater nurses) rhetorically emphasized the legitimacy of a new profession, inscribing the caregiver’s sacrifice through a rhetoric that affirmed a professional right at the same moment it performed a nationalistic rite of passage.

Jane E. Schultz
Indiana Univ.-Purdue Univ.-Indianapolis
jschult@iupui.edu