Hospital pencillings : being a diary while in Jefferson General Hospital, Jeffersonville, Ind., and others at Nashville, Tennessee, as matron and visitor.

  • Powers, Elvira J.
Date:
1866
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Hospital pencillings : being a diary while in Jefferson General Hospital, Jeffersonville, Ind., and others at Nashville, Tennessee, as matron and visitor. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material is part of the Elmer Belt Florence Nightingale collection. The original may be consulted at University of California Libraries.

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    March 19. A sad cjay, for us all. Dr. C. our ward surgepn, received orders to Teport for duty to I^ashvilje. The patients are all very sad, ^nd he feels the parting also. We improvised a lit tie oyster sujDper after the table was cleared of the full diet, for Ijhe ward-master and the old nurses. A torn, table cloth fi'om that Sanitary-box of rags, was cut in two for the narrow pine board, and looked quite like civilized life. We had oys- ters, a can of peaches, fresh butter and crackers, purchased of the sutler, and had a sadly lengthened, meal. He.^oes in the March 22. '■ ■ ' One of the young nurses in the ward, wlio told me yester- day moruin^ that he had to get tipsey for th^first time yet in his life, was last night unable to walk straight, and distin- guished himself by talking loud, enacting the braggadocio by that, and by kickiug over spittopns. He was .'coaxed off to bed at^ the tents, to prevent his being ^aken to tlie guard- house. This morning, the boys were joking hini as I entered the ward, when he said they all talked as if he was drunk, when he wasn't at all. But Charley told him that a man must be pretty far gone when he would feel his own pulse to see whether he was dead or not, which he had confessed do- ing the day before when he woke up at the tents, Ipecause he had felt so strangely. Jehu confesses that though never in the guard-house for di'inking, yet he served considerable of his time in one while at Memphis, but says that it was all on account of the pigs, turkeys and chickens iu Tennessee, that they would bite a fellow so that he was obliged to kill tliem in self defence. That's so, says Willie B. most seriously, and with an ominous shake of his head, upon which he wears a famous