Blind, Deaf, and Ready for Action: Emily Elizabeth Parsons, Civil War Nurse

At the height of the siege of Vicksburg during the American Civil War, Emily Parsons (1824-1880) acted as the tireless supervisor of nurses at the Benton Barracks Hospital, where thousands of the war’s injured were sent for treatment after their long and physically harrowing journey up the Mississippi. Reading the letters she sent home during this time, one gets a glimpse into the demands of the position - the organizing of individualized care for a constantly shifting roster of wounded men, the training of new nursing staff, the patrolling of the wards, the writing of reports, the oversight of the physical space and the resources required to maintain it, and the communication with families, all falling on the shoulders of one individual. 

Performing these duties with the level of attentiveness and admiration recognized by her superiors would have been enough to keep her in our memories on its own, but Parsons did all of it while overcoming a myriad of physical difficulties of long standing, on top of the persistent attacks from wartime diseases that repeatedly laid her low, only to see her rise and return to duty with a steadfastness that beggars belief. 

She was born in 1824 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where her father was a professor at Harvard. At the age of five, she “ran a pair of scissors through the pupil of her right eye” in the vivid words of her father, tearing the lens and robbing it entirely of sight, causing her left eye, in trying to compensate, to significantly weaken in sharpness as well. Two years later, at the age of seven, she contracted scarlet fever, which rendered her totally deaf, and though the effects lessened with time, as an adult she could only fully comprehend spoken language when it was directed purposefully at her, but could not participate in larger general conversations. 

Then, at twenty-five years of age she injured her ankle, snapping some of the tendons in a way that never healed, and left her in persistent pain when standing or walking for long periods of time. Outside of these details, we know little of her early years except for her father’s statements that, from her earliest days, she was characterized by her energy, singleness of purpose, and desire to be of use to others. She was the eldest of seven siblings, in a distinguished house that provided for her without the need to work, in an era when higher education for women was distinctly limited (Elizabeth Blackwell’s New York Infirmary did not open until 1857, and Clemence Lozier’s New York Medical College not until 1863), and so she could have expected a lifetime of social organizing to be the summit of her engagement with the outside world, but the arrival of the Civil War in 1861 fired her with the need to be Of Use.

Her father resisted the idea initially, worrying about how her health would hold up under the strain of practicing war medicine, but she was insistent, and he ultimately relented. She had no medical training at that point, and so took up a position as a volunteer nurse at Boston’s Massachusetts Hospital, learning by day and returning home to sleep, building up the experience base that would see her, in two years’ time, running the nursing services of one of the western theater’s largest army hospitals. 

By October of 1862 she was ready for service, and left home on the 15th for Fort Schuyler Hospital in New York, pitching out on her own in a brand new profession, arriving on the 21st to take up her post as matron of Ward 6, with 48 men and four attendants in her charge. Her work, both organizing regular patient care, and attending surgical procedures, was deemed excellent, but in December her health broke down, compelling her to recover at a friend’s house in New York while the military and medical professionals she had worked with expressed a keen desire for her to return to service once she recovered. Ultimately they decided she would be of most use at Lawson Hospital, a sprawling military hospital in St. Louis that had no trained nurses and was desperate for somebody to oversee operations there. After just three weeks of rest and recovery, Parsons struck out for the new posting, confident that her father would accede to her desire to continue in medicine in spite of the health lapse it seemed to have occasioned. 

Professor Parsons did have reservations - St. Louis was such a distance, and the new job seemed to bring even more responsibility than the last - but he trusted his daughter and wanted her to live a life that she thought of as worthwhile, and gave his belated blessing to the venture. She was only at Lawson a few weeks, however, before a more urgent summons came to her, to serve as a nurse aboard a military medical transport as it made its way down the Mississippi to Vicksburg, where the great siege that would secure the river for the Union and with it the western theater of the war, was to begin in a couple of months’ time. Though her ship sailed under the yellow flag of a medical non-combatant, it was fired at by Confederate forces on a number of occasions, which Parsons described as primarily exciting rather than frightening. 

The trip exposed Parsons directly to the war as it was being carried out, and to the Southern civilization that she had previously known only through newspapers and rumor, but she didn’t have much time to ruminate on all of this, as shortly after the return leg of the expedition she caught malaria, surviving thanks primarily to the kind and devoted attentions of new acquaintances in St. Louis. At this point, anyone would have forgiven her for returning home and enjoying some respite, comforted in the knowledge that she had done more than anyone could have asked of her, but of course that is not what she did, and no sooner was she back on her feet from her attack of malaria than she was seeking her next medical posting.

This was to be at Benton Barracks Hospital, where she arrived in April of 1863 and was made head of nursing, responsible for the care of some two thousand patients. Hard of hearing, with limited vision, recently recovered from malaria, and fighting through the pain that came with a job that was spent primarily on her feet, she took up this position with her accustomed zeal and efficiency, earning praise for the cleanliness and organization of her wards. In June she noted the sub-par condition of the erysipelas wards that were not part of her jurisdiction, and resolved to make improvements anyway. Erysipelas is a relatively rare disease today, treatable through antibiotics, but in the 19th century it was regarded with horror on account of its pronounced outward presentation (interesting fact: John Wilkes Booth was an erysipelas sufferer, as were John Stuart Mill and Richard Wagner), and at Benton nurses were known to avoid the erysipelas ward altogether until Parsons made it her business to personally clean the ward, whitewash the walls, and arrange for regular nursing care for the facility. 

Meanwhile, as the war progressed and the siege of Vicksburg grew more intense, Benton received increasingly high numbers of Black soldiers from the front, and Parsons flew to the task of organizing care for them, personally tending to the wards while she was training up a dedicated corps of Black women who wanted to serve as nurses at Benton, and even going so far as to advocate with the main kitchen to prepare special meals that were being requested of those soldiers and nurses as being reminders of home, such as corn bread in place of the regular flour bread. She listened to the stories of these soldiers about what life was like for them in the South, and was horrified at what they had seen and undergone, redoubling her efforts to give them the exact same standard of care as was being given to the white soldiers.

Unfortunately for Parsons, and those in her care, malaria is not a disease that is had once and then disappears forever. After a first attack is beaten down, it can hide in the body, multiply, and re-emerge for fresh attacks upon its host, and Parsons would weather a second outbreak in late 1863, from which she recovered and predictably returned to duty at Benton, and then yet another in the summer of 1864, which was sufficiently severe that even she was convinced of the need to return home for recovery, arriving in August of 1864. 

This was the end of Parsons’s direct engagement with war nursing. The fall of Vicksburg in July of 1863 had brought with it a gradual shift in Benton’s responsibilities as it shifted from war hospital to refugee center and experienced a consequent downsizing of medical staff. Parsons continued to support the displaced Black population there from afar, sending seeds and other goods to allow them to start a new life, but with the closing of the war her sights shifted to a new project - the creation of a hospital in Cambridge. She found it incredible that a city that was such an intellectual hub of the nation had to send its sick to other cities for treatment, and devoted herself in the post-war years to the raising of money and resources to create a hospital for women and children in Cambridge that would provide for the needs of the poor. 

Funeral Plot #608 at Mt. Auburn Cemetery, the final resting place of Emily Parsons.

She opened her first hospital in May of 1867, which had to close its doors after a year when the building proprietor refused to renew the lease. Her second hospital opened in December of 1869 and was supported by grants from the city, allowing it to last until 1872 when funding issues again drove it to close. Its example, however, convinced residents of the need to maintain such an institution in their midst, with a more secure financial basis. Parsons lived long enough to see that efforts to resurrect her Cambridge Hospital were promisingly underway, but passed away in 1880 of a stroke, six years before the opening of what is today known as Mt. Auburn Hospital, the direct descendant of her early efforts, and benefactor of the resolve that, in 1861, caused a woman with no medical experience to seek out training and strike out on her own to do whatever she could with the strength that she had, to ease the suffering of others.

FURTHER READING:

Fearless Purpose, a collection of Parsons’s nursing letters from 1862 through 1864, was published by her father after her death and marks one of the handful of original sources we have for what day-to-day life was like for a war nurse during the American Civil War. Parsons shines through the pages as a devoted, effective, and conscientious individual who is doing great things but who has no ego whatsoever about the institutions and practices being molded by her hands.