(Photo)
Born in Knox County, Ohio, Mother
Bickerdyke became
the best known, most colorful, and
probably most
resourceful Civil
War nurse. Widowed two years before the
war began,
she supported herself and her two
half-grown sons by
practicing as
a "botanic physician" in Galesburg,
Ill. When a
young Union volunteer physician wrote
home about the
filthy, chaotic
military hospitals at Cairo, Ill.,
Galesburg's
citizens collected $500 worth of
supplies and
selected Bickerdyke to
deliver them.
She stayed in Cairo as an unofficial
nurse, and
through her unbridled energy and
dedication she
organized the hospitals
and gained Grant's appreciation. Grant
sanctioned
her efforts, and when his army moved
down the
Mississippi, Bickerdyke
went too, setting up hospitals where
they were
needed. Sherman was especially fond of
this
volunteer nurse who followed
the western armies. By the end of the
war, with the
help of the U.S. Sanitary Commission,
Mother
Bickerdyke had built
300 hospitals and aided the wounded on
19
battlefields.
When his staff complained about the
outspoken, insubordinate female nurse
who
consistently disregarded the
armies red tape and military
procedures, Union
General William T. Sherman threw up his
hands and
exclaimed, "she
outranks me, I can't do a thing in the
world." They
were discussing Mary Ann Ball
Bickerdyke, a nurse
who ran
roughshod over anyone who stood in the
way of her
self appointed duties. She was known
affectionately
to her "boys",
the enlisted men in General Ulysses S.
Grant's and
then Sherman's army as
Mother
Bickerdyke. When
a surgeon questioned her authority to
take some
action, she replied, "On the
authority of
Lord God Almighty,
have you anything that outranks
that?"