From the Richmond Dispatch, 9/5/1861, p. 2, c. 5

Four of the Hospitals in this city occupied by sick and wounded Confederate soldiers, were visited by us yesterday. In the first, a very small one, we found a lady ministering to the wants of the patients with gentle hands and tender carefulness, unassisted at the moment by any of the other sex. In the second one, were several ladies and a clergyman, relieving the wants of those under their charge, entitling themselves to the grateful remembrances of the soldiers and the approbation of the public. In the third were numerous patients and a well-trained corps of attendants engaged in the same praiseworthy “labor of love." The fourth was the St. Charles Hospital, where is the well-known Henry Myers, whose natural element is where suffering humanity craves assistance. This hospital has on an average three hundred patients always in its wards, and since the 27th of July, when it went into operation, there have arrived fourteen hundred patients at its doors. The deaths in all this time and out of this large number, have been only twenty-one. Here, too, we saw the soft hand of woman pressed upon the brow of feverish patients, and heard her gentle voice uttering words of kindness. – This hospital is well supplied with nurses and attendants, who keep everything in order and guard against all uncleanliness that can possibly be avoided. We learn, however, that the physician in charge has by no means a sufficient number of medical assistants – a fact which we mention in the hope that, if they can possibly do so, the authorities will supply the deficiency. Verily, our people are ennobled by the war. Hard-visaged selfishness has been transformed into bright-faced beneficence; avarice has been exchanged for generosity; the love of “filthy lucre” gives place to philanthropy, and we may truly say that, in a different sense from that which the poet had in mind, “Grim-visaged war has smoothed his wrinkled front.”

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