Three years in field hospitals of the Army of the Potomac

Chapter 2: INTRODUCTION.

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About This Book

A personal wartime memoir recounts volunteer relief and nursing work with Soldiers' Aid Societies and the Sanitary Commission, chronicling care in field hospitals after major engagements such as Antietam and Gettysburg. It describes organizing supplies, feeding and tending wounded soldiers, searching for missing men, and the emotional toll on caregivers and families. Later sections follow campaigns, hospital evacuations, visits to military prisons with accounts of starvation and confinement, and reflections on burial, sanitary challenges, and the practical labor of sustaining medical operations in mobile army hospitals.

INTRODUCTION.

This simple story of hospital scenes, and the unpretending sketches of the few brave soldiers to which they allude, is arranged from the meager notes which were hurriedly written at the time they occurred, when there was not the most remote idea of ever preparing them for publication.

The events of the war are “graven as with an iron pen” upon my memory. To preserve some slight memento of them for friends at home, was the primary object of these notes: to gratify the same persons are they now grouped together.

Mrs. H.

Upper Merion,
Montgomery County, Penna.,
October 1, 1866.