Belle Reynolds

Belle Reynolds (born Arabella Loomis Macomber, 1840 to 1937) was an American nurse of the Civil War who later practiced medicine. Born in Shelburne Falls, Massachusetts, and raised partly in Iowa, she married an Illinois man in 1860 and in August 1861 joined her husband, a lieutenant in the Seventeenth Illinois Volunteer Regiment, in camp. For the rest of the war she travelled with the regiment, in wagon, ambulance, on a mule or on foot, nursing the sick, tending the wounded and comforting the dying, through the campaigns at Fort Henry, Fort Donelson, Shiloh and Vicksburg. Her care of wounded soldiers at Shiloh led the governor of Illinois to present her with a commission as major, as daughter of the regiment, and she kept a journal of her experiences. After the war she studied medicine and surgery and practiced it, serving on the clinical staff of Hahnemann College in Chicago and belonging to the American Institute of Homeopathy. She later lived in Santa Barbara, California, where she led women's reform organizations and died in 1937. Accounts differ on some wartime details, so the sources are named on this page.