Emily Elizabeth Parsons

Emily Elizabeth Parsons (1824–1880) was an American Civil War nurse, hospital administrator, and founder of Mount Auburn Hospital in Massachusetts. Her posthumous memoir, Fearless Purpose: Memoir of Emily Elizabeth Parsons, gives a rare glimpse of the American Civil War from a nurse's perspective as she describes her work tending to Union soldiers and managing the nursing staff at Benton Barracks Hospital in St. Louis, Missouri.

Parsons was born in Taunton, Massachusetts, on March 8, 1824, the eldest of seven children. Her father was Theophilus Parsons, a lawyer and supporter of Abraham Lincoln, and Dane Professor of Law at Harvard University. Her mother was Catherine Amory (Chandler) Parsons. She grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she graduated from Cambridge High School.

During childhood, an accident left her blind in one eye and scarlet fever left her partially deaf. Because of an ankle injury she suffered as a young woman, she was unable to stand for prolonged periods of time.

Before the American Civil War, military nursing in the United States was dominated by men and was not viewed as a good career for women. However, the massive amount of illness and casualties on both sides of the war brought women of all ages and economic classes to the sometimes makeshift hospitals that were set up during the war. When the Civil War broke out in 1861, Parsons, at the age of 37, expressed a desire to assist the Union army by working as a nurse. Her father tried to dissuade her, since he felt with all of her disabilities, she would not be very useful as a nurse and might put her own health in danger. Nonetheless, she began training as a volunteer at the Massachusetts General Hospital. After eighteen months, she was put in charge of a ward of fifty wounded Union soldiers at Fort Schuyler Military Hospital on Long Island in October 1862.

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