tal, at Memphis. This hospital
occupied the Gayoso House, formerly the largest hotel in Memphis. It was
Mrs. Bickerdyke's ambition to make this the best hospital of the six or
eight in the city, some of them buildings erected for hospital purposes.
A large hotel is not the best structure for a model hospital, but before
her energy and industry all obstacles disappeared. By an Army regulation
or custom, convalescent soldiers were employed as nurses, attendants
and ward-masters in the hospitals; an arrangement which though on some
accounts desirable, yet was on others objectionable. The soldiers not
yet fully recovered, were often weak, and incapable of the proper
performance of their duties; they were often, also, peevish and fretful,
and from sheer weakness slept at their posts, to the detriment of the
patients. It was hardly possible with such assistance to maintain that
perfect cleanliness so indispensable for a hospital. Mrs. Bickerdyke
determined from the first that she would not have these convalescents as
nurses and attendants in her hospital. Selecting carefully the more
intelligent of the negro women who flocked into Memphis in great
numbers, she assigned to them the severer work of the hospital, the
washing, cleaning, waiting upon the patients, and with the aid of some
excellent women nurses, paid by Government, she soon made her hospital
by far the best regulated one in the city. The cleanliness and
ventilation were perfect. The patients were carefully and tenderly
nursed, their medicine administered at the required intervals, and the
preparation of the special diet being wholly under Mrs. Bickerdyke's
supervision, herself a cook of remarkable skill, was admirably done.
Nothing escaped her vigilance, and under her watchful care, the affairs
of the hospital were admirably managed. She would not tolerate any
neglect of the men, either on the part of attendants, assistant surgeons
or surgeons.

On one occasion, visiting one of the wards containing the badly wounded
men, at nearly eleven o'clock, A. M., she found that the assistant
surgeon, in charge of that ward, who had been out on a drunken spree the
night before, and had slept very late, had not yet made out the special
diet list for the ward, and the men, faint and hungry, had had no
breakfast. She denounced him at once in the strongest terms, and as he
came in, and with an attempt at jollity inquired, "Hoity-toity, what's
the matter?" she turned upon him wit