I was astonished reading this. I had read about the “Angels of the Battlefield” who died caring for all the wounded in the Civil War, but far more sisters died here as a result of the North’s destruction of the South, its plunderings and murders of innocents after the war.
Pat McNamara’s Blog: Between 1873 and 1879, nearly eight thousand people died during Memphis’s Yellow Fever epidemics. While ministering to the sick, some thirty-four physicians lost their lives, along with twenty-four police officers and twenty-four firefighters, two dozen Catholic priests, and fifty women religious. In Memphis’s Calvary Cemetery there stands a monument to the priests, but none to the Sisters. Although a monument in Washington, D.C., honors nuns who served in Civil War hospitals, more Sisters died in Memphis in those six years than during the entire war. Account is here.
