strength at this period was very moderate, she seemed, on
entering the hospital, and witnessing the sufferings of brave men, who
had dared everything for their country, to be infused with a new and
strange vigor that sustained her through every exertion.

In particular cases of tedious convalescence, retarded by inferior
hospital accommodations, she--with her parents' consent--obtained
permission to take them home, and nurse them till they were restored to
health. Thus she labored on through the fall and winter of 1861-2 till
the battles of Shiloh and Pea Ridge filled the hospitals with wounded
men, at St. Louis and Mound City, and at Louisville and Evansville and
Paducah, and she began to feel that she must go where her services were
more needed, and give herself wholly to this work of caring for and
nursing the wounded patriots of the war.

After waiting some time for an opportunity to go she wrote to Mr. James
E. Yeatman, at St. Louis, the agent of Miss Dorothea L. Dix for the
appointment of women nurses in the hospitals of the Western Department,
and was accepted. On reporting herself at St. Louis she was commissioned
as a nurse, and in the fall of 1862 proceeded to Helena, where the army
of the Southwest had encamped the previous July, under Major-General
Curtis, and where every church and several private buildings had to be
converted into hospitals to accommodate the sick of his army.

It was here, during the winter of 1863, that the writer of this sketch
first met with Miss Maertz, engaged in the work of a hospital nurse,
enduring with rare heroism sacrifices and discomforts, labors and
watchings in the service of the sick soldiers that won the reverence and
admiration of all who saw this gentle woman thus nobly employed. It was
of her the following paragraph was written in the History of the Western
Sanitary Commission.

"Another one we also know whose name is likewise in this simple record,
who, at Helena, Arkansas, in the fall and winter of 1862-3, was almost
the only female nurse in the hospitals there, going from one building to
another, in which the sick were quartered, when the streets were almost
impassable with mud, administering sanitary stores and making delicate
preparations of food, spending her own money in procuring milk and other
articles that were scarce and difficult to obtain, and doing an amount
of work which few persons could sustain, living without the pleasant
society to which she had be