Emily Elizabeth Parsons
American nurse in the Civil War
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.
Early years
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.
Training in Massachusetts and work at Ft.
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Chronology, provenance and viewpoint should be read together before a broad social or political interpretation is accepted. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 18, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q22019215. VIAF identifies the subject as 3871817. The Library of Congress control number is n84074023. 2 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1824 and 1880.
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This entry incorporates text from “Emily Elizabeth Parsons” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.