This was very enjoyable to read. It features Alcott's signature wittiness and swiftly drawn characters, though surprisingly few medical details. Recommended for anyone who likes Alcott's more famous works.

How is it that I have never read these?

Alcott was a nurse for about six weeks during the Civil War. Her keen observations of the environmental conditions in the hospitals and her heartfelt concern for the wounded combine for a powerful depiction of a specific time and place.

This short read describes the experiences of Louisa May Alcott as a nurse in the Civil War. While I found some parts interesting, at least for me, there was nothing new here at all. I actually enjoyed the parts about her background and travels to the battlegrounds more than the parts about her as a nurse. It is probably unfair of me to not rate this higher since I am sure that what she was writing was new at the time, but for me there is nothing new or special here.

Despite its primary setting in a civil war hospital, this short little book is as funny as all get out. LMA clearly had the ability to look at life through a generously humorous lens, and she (obviously) knew how to tell a tale. To start with, she calls herself Tribulation Periwinkle in this story. Wait until you hear her names for her sisters and her brother-in-law.

Tribulation Periwinkle has gone from her home in the North to Washington D.C. to be a nurse for the wounded soldiers of the Army of the Potomac. She describes, in what reads like a diary of recollections, her trip from home to D.C., her arrival at the understaffed hospital, where she is thrown into the care of dying men, and her own subsequent illness that takes her back to her home again.

Several of the vignettes are quite poignant, recounting the suffering and dying around her. She also tackles the attitudes and treatment of the black servants that work in and around the hospital, and who receive as harsh a rejection from these Northerners as they might have expected from the South, which gives Alcott a forum to advocate for more than Abolition, but also for fair treatment of these newly freed men.

This is a quick read and an important one. Louisa May Alcott writes fiction, but it is informed by personal experience, and her own nursing of soldiers during the Civil War makes this a very realistic depiction. An early advocate for rights for both women and blacks, Alcott is a voice of the future and a glimpse into the past.

I’ve always enjoyed Alcott’s writing, but somehow had never heard of this book until my wife came across it at a bookstore. This book is autobiographical although Alcott doesn’t reveal the name of the hospital or the actual names of her patients.

For those who don’t know, Alcott served for a time as a nurse in D.C. until she contracted typhoid fever and left the hospital to convalesce back home in Massachusetts.

The sketches take part in sections detailing her experience: the preparation for the journey, the journey itself, the day shift at the hospital, the Night Shift, and a postscript that addresses questions a readers has been asking as her sketches had been published.

Alcott gives voice to an experience we often don’t hear about when considering Civil War literature. The women who worked the hospitals were the vanguard of the burgeoning nursing field and without their service, so many more soldiers would’ve died. Theirs is a valuable story to read.

Short fiction written in first person. Adapted from Alcott's own notes and letters during her stint as a nurse in the Civil War. Alcott's voice holds true. At times charming and funny, at times beautifully poetic and almost other-worldly. A couple times in these short pages, I found myself reading and re-reading a passage. In the world of war stories, this is short and probably doesn't rank. But it was compelling nonetheless and I'm glad I read it and I'm glad I own a copy of it.

I sought this book out after revisiting Louisa May Alcott’s Eight Cousins And Rose in Bloom. I never got to read these books as a child but always wanted to! I saw that she had written Hospital Sketches, and me being a nurse and enjoy books in the Civil War Era I ordered it through the library. I found it interesting, a little confusing at times, but hey it was written in 1863

This book is a snapshot of American hospitals during the civil war, told through the eyes of a nurse (i recommend reading the wikipedia article for historical context). This book will give you all of the feels.

Six weeks in a military hospital...

This is a short account of Louisa May Alcott's brief career as a nurse during the American Civil War. She only spent six weeks in the military hospital before falling ill with typhus and being persuaded by her father to come home, but during that time she saw first-hand some of the horrific injuries inflicted on the soldiers and the pretty basic and sub-standard care they got afterwards – in her hospital, at least, though she makes it clear there were other much more highly regarded hospitals at the time, too.

The first quarter of the book is taken up with her journey to the hospital in Washington. While mildly interesting in showing the difficulties of getting around during war-time, it does become somewhat tedious, mainly because of the tone she employs. Quite clearly, at that stage in her writing development Alcott had been reading a lot of Dickens, because not only does she refer to him on several occasions, but she adopts that kind of arch humour and tone of social superiority he employs from time to time, especially in his own factual writing. So, not content with giving herself the annoyingly twee pseudonym of Tribulation Periwinkle, she caricatures the people she meets and finds ways to mock them – their looks, their manners, the way they speak. I don't like it much when Dickens does it, and I wasn't any more keen on Alcott's version, especially since sometimes she doesn't quite manage to get the affectionate warmth into it that Dickens usually does.

Once she gets to the hospital, her tone changes for the most part, though she still tries to inject a little too much humour into it, I feel. But her observations on the way the hospital operated are quite insightful, and when she speaks of the suffering of the men, one feels her own voice comes through more clearly – that she becomes less conscious of herself as a writer and therefore more likeable as a human being. She doesn't dwell on scenes of gore, but rather on the emotional impact of their injuries on the men and, indeed, on herself. Occasionally she drifts into that peculiarly Victorian style of religious mawkishness (Dickens' influence again, I fear), and at one point regrets that she didn't give the men little sermons on a Sunday to set their minds on a higher path – an omission for which I expect the poor souls would have been profoundly grateful had they known. (It reminded me of a line from The Grapes of Wrath: “That's preachin'. Doin' good to a fella that's down an' can't smack ya in the puss for it.”)

A second generation Abolitionist, Alcott really shows, quite inadvertently, how ingrained the belief in racial superiority was at the time. Despite the fact that she was making a real sacrifice to support the cause of emancipation, when she speaks of the “colored people” her language and tone had me positively cringing. It's quite clear she sees them as inferior, almost sub-human, in every way, intellectually, culturally and even in physical appearance, and is rather nauseatingly self-congratulatory about her own condescension towards them. I did my very best to make allowances for the time and circumstances, but I found it hard going, and had the book not been so short, I doubt I'd have made it through.

The last section of the book tells of her own illness and how she went from nurse to being nursed. All in all, this is a very slight book, no more than novella length, and I would only recommend it as an interesting insight into Alcott herself, rather than as a particularly enjoyable or informative read in its own right. 2½ stars for me, so rounded up.

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I struggled reading her writing.

Louisa May Alcott her short-lived experiences as a nurse in a makeshift Yankee hospital to convey her thoughts and feelings as well as some of her patients' travails. The book seems to me to (maybe) be a speech or report on her efforts during the war. I found that, although the book is very short (80 pages), the first quarter was unnecessary with minute detail. I did, however, respond tearfully to some of the soldiers' brave and selfless stories of dying in sad inglorious circumstances. I found myself wishing over and over again that penecillin could have been available then. I think the number of deaths would have been halved.