Jehiel Baker

Pension File: 1130221
P.O.: Westport Point, Bristol Co., Mass.
Service: contract nurse from Sept./Oct., 1862 to June/July, 1863, and Nov., 1863 to March, 1864, at Portsmouth Grove
Applied: September 6, 1892
Status: rejected

I have to say, this one was a first.  I'm a little surprised I didn't run across one before.
Turns out, Jehiel Baker was a male nurse.
Now, let me be clear: male nurses, or male attendants, as the Hospital Steward's manual terms them, were not that uncommon during the Civil War.  In fact, prior to the war, the only nurses in the army were men--enlisted men and/or walking wounded who were pulled to work as ward masters, or help with things like dressing wounds, administering medicine, cooking, cleaning, etc.  During the war, many surgeons preferred to continue using male nurses rather than allow women to serve.  Male nurses did not disrupt the status quo.
Jehiel Baker, however, might have felt more at home amongst the female nurses, because he didn't quite fit the mold.  For reasons not given in his pension file, Baker was found medically unfit for regular military service.  Still determined to serve in some way, he went to work at the General Hospital in Portsmouth, RI in September, 1862.  Accordingly to the hospital records, he didn't go alone.  Cornelius T. Allen and Pardon S. Allen, also from Westport, began nursing at Portsmouth that September.  All three (and there might have been more!) contracted to serve a year.  Given the dates in Jehiel's file, I have a niggling suspicion that he became ill or something happened at home in June or July, 1863, that necessitated him returning home for a while, but he returned in November to finish out his contract.
After the war, Baker married Abby Lydia Gifford, with whom he had a daughter, Mercy Etta (b. 1876).  (Mercy went on to be a poet and artist--some of her work, mostly of what later became Horseneck Beach State Reservation, which her father owned, is actually featured by the Westport Historical Society, so definitely check it out!)  Jehiel seemed to do rather well for himself.  He owned the largest cranberry bogs on Horseneck, and later filed a patent for a 'sanding machine,' to be used in the cranberry bogs; he became the first Sunday School superintendent at the local Methodist Episcopal church.  When he applied for a pension in 1892, he noted that he had a 2/3 interest in a 20 acre cranberry bog, which brought him about $300 a year, as well as a house and small garden.  He biggest problem seems to have been his health.  When he applied for his pension in 1892, he was 55 years old, yet he was already unable to do any physical labor due to rheumatism and chronic dyspepsia (recurring pain in the upper abdomen), and he had lost sight in his right eye, and was losing it in the left.  Unfortunately, the Army Nurses Pension Act covered only female nurses, which meant Jehiel never received a pension for his work.  He died on March 12, 1915.