Kate Cumming has become an iconic minor figure of the American Civil War. Her book has been excerpted many times in other works and even in the PBS documentary, Abraham and Mary Lincoln: A House Divided. Her extraordinary journal of her time as a nurse in Confederate hospitals is important for illuminating the history of medicine of Civil War nurses and as an example of the writing of an educated southern woman caught up in the catastrophic effects of war. Kate was highly religious, poetic, compassionate, amusing, embittered by the war, blamed Abraham Lincoln for all that befell the south, and was blind to the realities of African-American life. Yet her record captures the reader and it is difficult to dislike her.