Civil War Nurse, Author. Of all the women arriving in Philadelphia on July 5, 1863, as volunteer nurses for Gettysburg, she was the only one rejected by Dorothea Dix. She was 23 at the time. Undaunted, the young Quakeress sat down on the train scheduled to carry the women west and remained in her seat until it pulled into the station at Gettysburg the following day. Immediately she went to work with a dedication and efficiency that won respect from the doctors and affection and a silver medal of appreciation from admiring patients. A compassionate woman of boundless drive, she stayed with the army, usually as a paid nurse, until May 13, 1865. Her brief term in the Contraband Hospital in Washington D.C., discouraged her because blacks received such degrading treatment. She preferred working in field hospitals and there her reputation thrived as an organizer and as a source of desperately needed supplies that she was able to get from civilians. With severe fighting to the south in mid-1864, her services were requested at the II Corps Hospital at Brandy Station, Virginia. She was the first woman to arrive at Belle Point, where she tended wounded from the Wilderness, then served at Fredericksburg, Port Royal, White House Landing, City Point, and Petersburg. She often wrote letters home richly describing hospital life. She subjected her peers to blunt criticism or approval as she judged their usefulness, but her soldiers received only praise for their endurance under extreme suffering. The task she hated the most was writing to the family of a dying man. She regarded General Ulysses Grant a mere instrument of war; coming to this opinion after the Wilderness. On April 9, 1865, she visited Richmond, and a few days later she joined in the surrender celebrations at Grant's headquarters. Before going home, she stopped in Washington D.C. to see her boys in the Grand Review of the Armies. Her stint in the Contraband Hospital convinced her of the need to labor among freed slaves. Sponsored by the Society of Friends, she opened the Laing School for Negroes in Pleasantville, South Carolina. After teaching for a decade she moved to Philadelphia. She helped found the Society for Organizing Charity in 1878 and the Children's Aid Society and Bureau of Information 4 years later. She never married, remaining active in social work and in urban development almost until her death, in Philadelphia. Her letters, written from July 7, 1863 to May 13, 1865, were first published in 1937 under the title "South After Gettysburg." It became a bestseller. Her letters provide a valuable description of the tragic aftermath of battle and a frontline nurse's attempt to cope with suffering.