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The “Ladies’ Relief Hospital” in Lynchburg, Virginia, broke so many traditions it is hard to keep them straight. It was the first hospital to be started by women who left the parlor comforts of their antebellum homes to encounter blood, dirt, and infirmities of a wartime hospital. Five hundred women, sanctioned as the Ladies’ Relief Society, pioneered as the first female workers in Lynchburg. They broke with the Southern code that “a woman’s place is in the home.” Most of these women were married to the wealthy entrepreneurs living on Daniel’s, Diamond, and Garland Hills. They willingly abandoned their affluent lifestyles to pursue skills in nursing, a field previously predominated by males. However, they were the antithesis of a uniformed nurse today. Dressed in prim hats, long skirts and shirtwaists, always very proper, they brought in their food baskets and flowers, provided “delicacies” from their kitchens, wrote letters to the soldiers families, and read to the patients.. The “ladies’ duties also involved putting on tourniquets and cleansing wounds. The death rate at the Ladies’ Relief Hospital was surprisingly low, resulting in the most severely wounded men being sent there for care.
The Confederate medical and other official records were destroyed by fire in Richmond, Virginia, April 1865
