WORMELEY, Katharine Prescott

Born 14 January 1830, Ipswich, England; died 4 August 1908, Jackson, New Hampshire

Daughter of Ralph and Caroline Wormeley

Katharine Prescott Wormeley was descended, on her moth-er's side of the family, from Boston merchants and, on her father's, from a long line of Virginians. The family lived in England for many years, settling in the U.S. after her father's death in 1852.

At the beginning of the Civil War, Wormeley threw herself into volunteer work. She formed the local chapter of the Woman's Union in Newport, Rhode Island, and headed it until 1862. She also obtained a contract from the federal government to manufacture clothing for the troops, thus giving employment to otherwise destitute soldiers' wives. In April 1862, Wormeley began working for the U.S. Sanitary Commission, a private volunteer organization, as a matron on a hospital ship. Later that year, she became "lady superintendent" of Lowell General Hospital in Portsmouth Grove, Rhode Island. Her health, however, gave out after a year, and she returned home to Newport. After the war, Wormeley continued her charitable work. She helped found the Newport Charity Organization Society in 1874 and served it in various capacities for the next 15 years. She also established an industrial school for girls that offered classes in cooking, sewing, and domestic management.

Besides charity work, Wormeley's passion was for literature. Fluent in French, she translated many of the works of Balzac, Molière, Daudet, and Saint-Simon. In 1892 she published A Memoir of Honoré de Balzac. In The Other Side of War (1889), Wormeley describes her function on the hospital ship Daniel Webster : "Our duty is to be very much that of a housekeeper. We attend to the beds, the linen, the clothing of the patients; we have a pantry and store-room, and are required to do all the cooking for the sick, and see that it is properly distributed according to the surgeons' orders; we are also to have a general superintendence over the condition of the wards and over the nurses, who are all men." Wormeley and her companions were on duty almost constantly; when they could relax, space and privacy were limited.

When Wormeley was loaned temporarily to the medical department of the Army, she discovered conditions that were, incredibly, worse than what she had already seen. Accustomed to abundant supplies of food, bandages, and medications, she found the Army lacked adequate stores of all three. Because of this many men died whom, Wormeley believes, the Sanitary Commission might have saved. The commission's example finally shamed the government into reorganizing its medical department in July 1862. Then, Wormeley claims with pride, the commission could resume its original functions, "inspecting the condition of the camps and regiments, and continuing on a large scale its supply business."

The Other Side of War is an appropriate title for Wormeley's work. As she notes, it is far too easy, both for her contemporaries and modern historians, to get caught up in the romance and glory of war without fully acknowledging the human suffering that invariably accompanies it. She and the countless other women who worked in the hospitals of the Civil War, in both the North and South, remind us of its true horror.

Other Works:

The United States Sanitary Commission: A Sketch of Its Purpose and Work (1863).

Bibliography:

Brockett, L. P., and M. C. Vaughn, Woman's Work in the Civil War (1867). Massey, M. E., Bonnet Brigades (1966). Maxwell, W. O., Lincoln's Fifth Wheel (1956).

—JANET KAUFMAN