Editor’s note: second in a two-part series.
Kate Cumming was a Scottish-born Confederate nurse and diarist whose Civil War service included several months in Chattanooga. She became one of the best-known hospital workers in the Army of Tennessee and an important chronicler of Confederate medical care.
Cumming was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, around 1835 and settled in Mobile, Alabama, where she identified strongly as a Southerner. Influenced by contemporary discussions of nursing, including admiration for Florence Nightingale, she became interested in the idea of women caring professionally for soldiers.
At the start of the war, her family and local society considered hospital nursing improper for a “respectable” lady, and initially she only helped prepare other women to serve the soldiers.
After hearing a passionate appeal by the Rev. Benjamin M. Miller, a Mobile clergyman, for Southern women to nurse the wounded and against family wishes, she volunteered to go to the front.