Mary A. Huff

Pension File: 1133684, 815217
P.O.: Nova Scotia
Service: Nurse at Carver Hospital, D.C.
Applied: 1892
Status: Accepted

I know I promised you Mary Walker, but her papers are a two-day project.  So, in the interim, I pulled out Mary Huff's file.
Mary Huff is one of those wonderful occasions where someone kept track of who served at the hospital, and the War Department managed to find it.  She served at Carver Hospital in Washington, D.C. from October 17th, 1864, to June 3rd, 1865 alongside a number of other women whose pension files I pulled, like Mary A. McKee, Waitie Harris, and Sarah Cowgill.  The catch (it's not a real blogpost if there wasn't a catch): the rolls listed her as a cook, which meant she didn't fall under the 1892 Act.  She was also no longer a resident of the US.  There's nothing in the file on the problems created by Huff living in Canada. There is, however, tons on the problem created by listing her as a cook.
In fact, it looks like the Bureau had a minor meltdown.  Huff's file is full of official letters, briefings, and legal decisions centered on the specifics of the 1892 Act.  I promise I'll try to keep the legalese to a minimum.
There were two major problems.  By 1892, many surgeons and stewards who could testified to a woman's service were dead, and nurses had to rely on the testimony of enlisted men and nurses.  The issue here was whether or not that testimony was sufficient to establish service under a competent authority.  The other problem was the exact status of the women who worked for Annie Wittenmyer in the special diet kitchens, since they served both as nurses and cooks--cooks, of course, being completely left out of the 1892 Act.
Hoke Smith, the Secretary of the Interior at the time, made the final legal ruling.  The "fact of service," or whether or not a woman served as a nurse under competent authority, could be proved by any competent witness, including enlisted men and nurses.  However, they did not have authority to employ nurses.  Self-explanatory.  As to the women employed by Wittenmyer,

"the dietary nurse sustains a relation to a patient which is much akin to that of a medical adviser.  Physicians are themselves constantly urging the efficiency of diet as a safeguard against disease as well as a remefy therefor.  It requires intelligence as well as delicate knowledge of the nature and effect of certain foods to fit a woman for such a position.  They often have, for this, a peculiar fitness, and the services rendered by such women are invaluable and entitled to great consideration."

Therefore, Smith considered their pensionable status under the Act "unquestionable."
There were also two substantial "opinions."  As dull as it sounds, the briefs answered some of the questions I kept asking as I went through the files.  One brief, an Opinion in re Nurse Pension Act acknowledged just how difficult it was to establish a nurse's service using service records or testimony.  Some times, no evidence could be found, and other times the record listed women as cooks, laundresses, waitresses--positions other than nurses, as was the case with Mary Huff.  They were listed as such, the opinion stated, "presumably in compliance with a request from the Surgeon General's Office, that [because] a larger number of nurses had been accepted in the Department...than had been intended," they should be listed under another name, but given the same pay.  The problem here was finding evidence to controvert the records.  Then there was my favorite: sometimes the records showed a woman paid for less than the required six months (usually because the records were spotty or the women signed vouchers allowing the Surgeon to draw their pay to buy things for the soldiers), but the woman claimed more than six months service.  And then there were the people whose homes were used as hospitals and they themselves worked as nurses.
What to do, what to do?
Here's the short answer.  Yes, you can get a pension if you are listed as something other than a nurse, so long as you can deliver proof and were appointed by a competent authority.  So, if you were listed as a cook, laundress, or opened your house, as long as you actually nursed, you come under the Act.  No, you can't deny a pension based solely on payment records (or lack thereof).  Payment records are only corroborative evidence.
So why do payment records still have so much 'oomph' in later records?  And why are Wittenmyer's nurses still having issues getting pensions a few years later?  In short, why do they make a somewhat hasty retreat on all these decisions within months?!