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Author: Louisa May Alcott
ISBN : B00A62YHH4
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Format: PDF
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Before Little Women brought her wider fame, Alcott achieved recognition for her accounts of her work as a volunteer nurse in an army hospital. Written during the winter of 1862-63, her lively dispatches revealed the desperate realities of battlefield medicine as well as the tentative first steps of women in military service.
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- File Size: 553 KB
- Print Length: 80 pages
- Publisher: Dover Publications (February 9, 2012)
- Sold by: Amazon Digital Services, Inc.
- Language: English
- ASIN: B00A62YHH4
- Text-to-Speech: Enabled
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- Lending: Enabled
- Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #476,683 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
Free Download Civil War Hospital Sketches
As part of my Civil War reading, I am trying to mix it up between fiction (contemporary and historical), non-fiction, memoir, war and social issues. For my last book of 2012, I read Louisa May Alcott's collection of newspapers articles she wrote about her time as a Civil War nurse in Washington, D.C. in December 1862 and January 1863.
LMA only served as a nurse for three weeks, but this brief service changed her life profoundly. Of this time, she said that she was rarely ill before it and never truly well afterwards. She had contracted typhus at the hospital and was treated with a compound containing mercury, which wreaked havoc on her body and most probably shortened her life. On the other hand, her time as a nurse on her own in a city far from her Concord home during the war broadened her vision and deepened her perspective.
In typical Victorian lady fashion, LMA assumes the guise of Tribulation Periwinkle who then provides a first-person account of LMA's own experiences--deciding to join the nursing core, traveling alone by train to Washington, living in a boarding house, working in a hospital (she tended the wounded from the battle of Fredericksburg, Dec. 11-15, 1862). The latter encompasses so much--the men themselves, some old but most heart-breakingly young--she held their hands as they died, read them letters from home, and wrote their final goodbyes, comforted their loved ones--she dressed wounds, assisted surgeons, fed and cleaned and comforted, and then finally fell ill herself.
At first the persona of Trib grated a bit--basically Jo March on steroids.