Editor, Gazette-Journal:

I am writing in response to the article concerning the bronze statue honoring Capt. Sally Tompkins who was a candidate of the then-proposed Virginia Women’s Monument: Voices in the Garden. Our small rural community, Mathews, donated/raised $200,000 to have a life-sized bronze statue of Ms. Tompkins.

I am an R.N. of many years, as are my husband, our two daughters, three granddaughters, and one granddaughter in school currently. The choice to enter the health care industry is not only a career but also certainly a calling to help your fellow man. I have the utmost respect for Capt. Tompkins’s contribution to her profession as a Civil War nurse and hospital administrator.

What she did, in that day and age, was nothing short of miraculous.

On July 21, 1861, she opened Robertson Hospital located in the home of Judge John Robertson after the first Battle of Manassas. The Surgeon General at that time decided military hospitals run by commissioned officer...