HOSPITAL SKETCHES FROM THE CIVIL WAR

While serving as a volunteer nurse for the Union Army in the American Civil War, Louisa May Alcott recorded her experiences in the letters she sent home, later published under this title. They provide a raw and honest account of the reality of battlefield medicine in a conflict that tore her country apart. Her compassionate narrative also highlights the under-appreciated role of women in medicine. This short book marked the beginning of her astonishingly successful career which culminated in the publication of Little Women. Born in November 1832, on her 30th birthday she spent six transformative weeks at the Union Hotel Hospital in Georgetown, Washington DC, 500 miles from home and surrounded by dead, dying and diseased soldiers where twice as many died of disease as from fighting the enemy. Alcott nearly suffered the same fate, contracting typhoid pneumonia and was only saved when her father arrived at the hospital to take her home. He was an abolitionist and her mother a suffragist and their involvement in a number of radical movements meant Louisa and her siblings were surrounded by some of the periods best known writers and thinkers like Ralph Waldo Emerson and she received tuition from Henry David Thoreau. 112 page new full price paperback.