Page:The part taken by women in American history.djvu/368

Rh and Mrs. Hill volunteered her services there in April, 1863, and remained until August, 1865, after the close of the war. She gave her service without remuneration, since the pay of volunteer nurses was to go into a hospital fund to buy extras for the soldiers which the Government did not provide. When the battles of the Wilderness were going on, all hospital supplies and sanitary stores had been sent to the front and there were none in Washington. Mrs. Hill wrote to her mother about it and the letter was read next morning in four churches. Immediately congregations were dismissed and all went home to return to the Town Hall bringing tablecloths, linen and cotton sheets, the best they had. The women and men worked all day long making and rolling bandages and picking lint. Before nine o'clock that night the nurse's letter from the front had resulted in two large drygoods boxes the size of upright pianos packed with stores and on their way to Washington. After the war hospital closed, Mrs. Hill turned to the study of medicine.

Afterwards she became a medical student at the New England Hospital for Women and Children at Roxbury, Massachusetts. She was graduated at the medical department of Michigan University, Ann Arbor, in the year 1874. She then went to Dubuque, Iowa, and opened an office and carried on a large and active practice for years.

Mrs. Nichols entered the service of volunteer nurses at the request of her husband, who wished her to join him in Chicago where his regiment had been sent on exchange after having been taken prisoners at Harper's Ferry. Her determination to get to his bedside immediately after reaching Chicago illustrated the pluck and courage which showed all through her career as Government nurse. She reached that city at two o'clock in the morning, it was three miles to Camp Douglas where the soldiers were quartered. Alone and in the darkness she found the gate of the camp enclosure, but it was closed and she was challenged by sentries. It was only by insistent appeal that the officer in charge allowed her to enter and find her husband. She slept while at this hospital in the baggage room on a couple of blankets and a pillow, and worked all of the next day getting the sick of the camp ready to be taken to the city hospital. Subsequently she accompanied her husband to Washington, and from there she marched with the regiment to Fairfax crossing the Long Bridge. After the main body of troops had gone to the stockade camp, she and her husband remained at Fairfax nearly two weeks with nine sick men. The only facilities they had for cooking were a coffee pot, one mess pan, a spider and the fireplace. But they saved the lives of all of their patients. By the time they reached the front the hospital was full of men sick with typhoid fever and other maladies, and Mrs. Nichols passed through scenes which she never forgot. She took what little sleep was allowed her, wrapped in a blanket on a pile of straw. One morning as she was about to enter the hospital the doctor met her with the dreadful news that smallpox had broken out. But so heroic was her effort that out of the eighteen cases which developed only one died. She was also at Gettysburg and later at