Tough, determined, intelligent women with names like Murphy, Byrne, Ward, Leahy, and Maguire. The 36 sisters who nursed at Stanton Hospital, near Washington, D.C., were not angels but women. “More lovely than anything in art are the pictures that remain with me of these sisters going on their rounds of mercy among the suffering and dying.”Ī nice sentiment, but by sanctifying these sisters he unintentionally diminished their human accomplishments. “Of all the forms of charity and benevolence seen in the crowded wards those of the Catholic sisters were among the most efficient,” Lincoln wrote after visiting Stanton Hospital, staffed by the Sisters of Mercy, the order founded by Catherine McAuley in Dublin barely 30 years before. “Veritable angels of mercy” are the words President Abraham Lincoln used to describe the nuns he saw tending wounded soldiers at one of the 25 military hospitals hurriedly set up around Washington to receive the more than 20,000 casualties – Union and Confederate – of some of the bloodiest battles of the Civil War. In America, the Sisters of Mercy would make their impact on the battlefields in the Civil War, beginning a legacy in health care that is still going strong today. They worked with her to make nursing more effective and to improve sanitary conditions. The Sisters of Mercy were the first women to go with Florence Nightingale during the Crimean War in 1854.
From the Civil War to Chicago’s Mercy Hospital, the extraordinary history of Irish nuns in health care.
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