The interchange of letters between Miss Wormeley and G[eorgeanna] ended in an agreement that they should join hands again for hospital work at Portsmouth Grove, and as G. made bold to propose… Jane and Sarah Woolsey as co-laborers, all three of them were given the chance they coveted. Miss Wormeley’s plan for organizing will give you an idea of … [their] duties …..
Miss Wormeley to Georgeanna Woolsey
NEWPORT, Sept, 5th, ’62.
My dear Georgy: I found the new surgeon inclined to one woman for each ward (twenty-eight wards or barracks, of sixty men in each). I hunted him out of that idea however. Everything in the domestic management of the hospital being left to me, I shall gently avail myself of the courtesy. Now then for your advice. My ideas are these. Please give your decided opinion on them. To give five wards, sixty beds to each ward, to the superintendence of five friends–you, your sister, cousin, H. Whetten, and a lady here whom I esteem and consider efficient. Under these I should put one, two, or three women nurses, as occasion may require. These five ladies would be responsible for everything connected with their wards, in general.
You know what general supervision means,–cleanliness, beds, linen, due washing thereof, etc., etc., in all of which the women under you should do the actual work whilst you see that they do it. . . . I want to have the men intelligently looked after, as only a lady can. I should therefore wish that the ladies should go round with the surgeons invariably–to make short notes of each patient’s treatment, medicine, and diet. Medicines I should want her to make sure were properly and timely given. The special diet lists ordered by the surgeon I should wish to be handed in to me as soon as practicable. I shall put a special diet kitchen at each end of the Barrack St. with a female cook in each, whom I shall attend to myself. . . .
This is in general a sketch of my ideas. What do you say? Will you come? . . . I want to point out to you that no ladies have ever been allowed to come into a U. S. General Hospital in this way–much less warmly requested, and thanked, and confided in, as we are,–for of course it has nothing personal to myself in it; it is General Hammond’s first cordial reception and experiment of ladies in hospital, and is in consequence, as he told me, of the grateful sense he had of what we did at White House. . . .
Now as to our own living there. A house is building for us, to be finished by the 12th of this month. It has bedrooms for all the female nurses, a dining-room for ditto, an office for me. We shall have to carpet our own rooms, and adorn them as we see fit; the Government supplies the common necessities of a bed, etc., for the nurses in general. . . .
I should want to have you with me at the start. Can you arrange to come? . . .
Write me at once, please. What a vile place you are in; the mails take a week to go.