Sometimes cloying and saccharine, playing the screwball, then suddenly all the hubbub comes to these terrible moments of stillness. The deaths are hushingly done. And so interesting for her substitute-mother-spinster/lover energies and how she must sublimate them in her nurse role, while airing them in these letter-sketches, which blend gender roles and are told in retrospect through the veil of the pneumonia she contracted during this admiral term of volunteering.

This is very Louisa May, with all the vibrancy and idealism she brought to her better known work. No pseudonym can disguise that. Her sense of humor and her powers of description are peak, and she's just a ton of fun to read. And while there are some knotty incongruities to white abolitionist thinking that Alcott demonstrates very well, the moment when she smacks a kiss on a Black baby to the complete horror of the other nurse is pretty satisfying.

According to editor Bessie Z. Jones, Alcott's reports about the state of medicine during the Civil War were some of the very earliest. This is a small book and very well written, full of Louisa May's spirit, astute observations of conditions, soldiers and staff, and fine references to appropriate great literature. It is an energetic book, and describes the short but very eventful month that Alcott spent nursing in Washington D.C before she became ill and her father appeared to take her home. In the book she has given herself the unlikely name of Nurse Tribulation Periwinkle but this is very much her story, filled with compassion and heart. Well worth the read.

Wow. How can such a tiny book have so much information in it? I have always love LMA but this has to be my new favorite book by her. There wasn't a such thing as pain medicine in this time period. How did the patients cope? Through connecting and community -- something we, as a people, don't understand anymore. Such a good thing to read with Connecting by Larry Crabb and Living From the Heart Jesus Gave You.

She caught my attention from her use of randomly hilarious idioms. She has a different writing style that is pretty lost now. But I think it's great.

I lost interest in the book halfway through after she got sick (maybe she lost her humour)
But mostly due to the audible readers voice
(Aaron Elliot) which was boring as all get out.
It was stumbling over words or lack of knowing where to fluctuate words & sentences.


Quotes:

"Peace descending like oil upon the ruffled waters of my being"

"Man... no I prefer to say boy, with a scornful emphasize upon the word as the only means of revenge now left to me"

"For I fear that my old enemy - the CRAMP- will cease me by the foot if I attempt to swim"

"Every one seems to be scrubbing their white steps. All the houses look like tidy jails, with their outside shutters. Several have crepe on the door-handles, and many have flags flying from roof or balcony. Few men appear, and the women seem to do the business, which, perhaps, accounts for its being so well done."

"I follow their movements with an interest that is really exhausting"

"I feel as if I should enjoy throwing a stone at somebody. Hard."

"I endulged in a most unpatriotic wish, that I was safe at home again with a quiet day before me and no neccesity for being hustled up, as if I were a hen, and had only to hop off my roost, give my plumage a peck and be ready for action."

"As no two persons see the same thing with the same eyes, my view of hospital life must be taken through my glass, and held for what it is worth."

"It is important to look well after the cheerfulness in life."

I like this because reading about Alcott’s firsthand experiences being a nurse during the Civil War is just plain interesting. How many such accounts written by acclaimed authors could there be? What we are told feels very real and honest. Secondly, I like it because you et a grip on Alcott’s personality. Thirdly, I like it because she weaves in humor. As she states at the end, it is important “to look well after the cheerfulness in life”. Without this attitude a book such as this could easily become dark and dreary. However, do not think that she shies away from that which sad and grisly

Alcott is outspoken, alternately criticizing and praising. She is determined and intelligent. She has spunk. Her personal attributes come through in the text.

Be warned, Alcott does not express herself as we do today. She uses words, idioms and manners of speech less frequently employed nowadays. To appreciate the elegance of her lines a reader must pay attention. It is not wrong to state that her writing is somewhat dated, but this doesn’t matter if you are willing to make an effort to understand.

Alcott had intended a three month stint as a nurse at Hurly Burly House in Washington. She became ill and had to go home sooner.

So why not more stars? It is not a wow book, even if I am glad to have read it.

Anne Hancock narrates the audiobook. I didn’t like her narration at all. Her tone is too light and sweet. She reads too fast. Prose that is dated must be read at a slower pace. She catches the levity in the author’s lines but lacks the ability to properly alter her intonation for lines of serious portent.

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Interested in other nurse memoirs? Check out this: The Backwash of War: The Human Wreckage of the Battlefield as Witnessed by an American Hospital Nurse (5 stars)
It is for the First World War, not the Civil War.

Cynda pointed out these two books
1.A Black Woman's Civil War Memiors by Susie King Taylor
2.Memoranda during the War by Walt Whitman
which could be of interest too!

This is basically Louisa May Alcott painting a picture of her time as a nurse during the Civil War in Washington DC. So exactly as it says on the tin. It was very short, but it was interesting to hear a first hand account of what this sort of environment was like.

Alcott's time as a nurse was ultimately cut short when she contracted typhoid fever. The cures, which included mercury, caused their own problems. Seriously, look at a photo of her before she went compared with after. She ages drastically.

A concise brief account of nursing in late 1862 and the travails that accompanied volunteer women who joined “the fight” with equal vigor as men in the Civil War. Alcott’s wit and smart allusion make her a quintessential 19th century classic whom we are fortunate to receive such an early publication from on a historical subject that begs such talented narrators. My copy was from the John Harvard Library, 1960, with a fantastic contextual introduction almost as long as the core text.
At times, i was lost by her freewheeling monologue and series of events. [n.b. my mother drew to my attention that LMA was in-fact describing donkeys in the street in the “Day Off” chapter]

A wonderful short piece, recollecting Alcott's service as an Army nurse during the Civil War in a fictional sketch. Blending social reform, human pathos, and Alcott's signature hilarity, this is a wonderful read. Alcott combines the comical and emotional in a satisfying, affective blend, successfully bringing the experience of war to the home front, and notably from the perspective of a woman at the front-lines of a military hospital.

Louisa May Alcott spent six weeks working as a nurse in Washington, DC during the Civil War. Her service was cut short after she came down with typhoid fever. Tribulation Periwinkle is the name she gave herself in this short fictionalized account of her experiences. The main role of a nurse during that time period was to wash, feed, and provide comfort to the wounded soldiers as they healed from surgery, or as they died from their injuries. I found the first part of the book somewhat slow as she described her troubles in getting to Washington. However, it got interesting in the second part, which was the "sketches" of hospital life and the emotional stories of her patients, and also in the last part as she described her own illness and how she was cared for when she went from nurse to patient. I enjoyed this short book, the stories were both touching and humorous, and it brought history to life.

Alcott's Hospital Sketches is, in the Bedford edition edited by Alice Fahs, a 6-chaptered memoir of Alcott's half a year spent nursing for the Union Army in Georgetown, outside DC, during the Civil War. I add the disclaimer because Fahs mentions in her introduction that the sixth "chapter" is actually a letter tacked on after the publication of the original five-chaptered Hospital Sketches. And it shows. I didn't shudder or cringe at anything Alcott wrote in those first five chapters even though one of them, "A Night," describes the slow, sentimental death of her beloved John. But in that final letter, the entire tone of the book changes from tragicomedy, dark and gritty, to the grotesque, all but describing the sounds arms make when they're being sawed off by a rougher-than-necessary Dr. P.

Chapter one, "Obtaining Supplies," covers how it is that Alcott made up her mind to (all but) join the Army as a nurse. It establishes a tone of playful cheeriness that pervades the novel? memoir? journal? -- especially in light of difficulties, such as all the gender-related obstacles she faces when trying to get a rail pass from Concord, MA, to Washington, DC, as well as all the other permissions a woman of her time needs to travel alone.

Chapter two, "A Forward Movement," recounts her trip to DC and then onto the hospital, which she dubs The Hurley-Burley House, with stops in New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore along the way. Her first view of Washington, DC, "a spacious place, its visible magnitude quite took my breath away, and of course I quoted Randolph's expression, 'a city of magnificent distances,' as I suppose every one does when they see it," so squared with my own experience that, had I not been already endeared to LMA, she would have had me right there. We also see quite a bit more development of her alter ego, Tribulation Periwinkle, in this chapter, whom I believe LMA uses to call attention to the sentimental irony of her usually gendered or classed situations -- as well as to contribute to the sense that LMA is more aware of what's going on than a simple retelling would allow.

Chapter three, "A Day," takes us through a day-in-the-life of a quirky, intellectual, sarcastic Army "Nurse" -- and we begin to see just how loose a term that actually is, as the methods used in these hospitals seem so illogical and foreign to a germaphobe like me or any contemporary reader.

Chapter four, the most sentimental and, appropriately, dark chapter, is "A Night," in which she recalls the night that John dies. This chapter is fascinating for a number of reasons. It's the first time in the book that she actually addresses PTSD (though not called that at the time) outright in the fevers and reactions that soldiers relieving the war produces. It relies on the very dichotomy between woman and mother than the nineteenth century is so good at keeping separated in LMA's transformation from maternal caretaker to man-sensitive woman then back to maternal--even grandmotherly--caretaker. And it ends with two men kissing each other goodbye, "tenderly as women." Chock-full of intimacy, but Fahs contends that, when compared to other first-hand accounts of John's death, we find that LMA actually over-sentimentalizes the scene by adding the final goodbyes series and by playing up the homoeroticism of the final farewell between John and Ned.

Chapter five, "Off Duty," explains that LMA was relieved of her duty after contracting an illness that killed another woman working in her ward then details her return to her family home, but not before one last action scene wherein LMA rushes from room to room of the hospital in order to save a dying soldier's life (actually, it's a sardonic parody of the hospital's poor organization and implementation of care, a recurring theme in the narrative). It's remarkable, still, for its inclusion of LMA's brief encounter with a black family and the responses given by those around her to LMA's genuine concern for and acceptance of them. The chapter also details some of LMA's duties after she was no longer in contact with the bodies as well as what she enjoyed paying attention to now that her mind wasn't constantly occupied with wounds and dying.

The postscripted chapter, as I hinted at earlier, goes back through her time in a hurry but adds to it some gruesome details she left out in the first, original five chapters. I get the impression that she's been asked so much about those details that she felt compelled to, from the perspective of her alter ego Tribulation Periwinkle, tell the dirty underside of being a nurse... while also taking a backhanded stab at the way things were done at the Hurley-Burley House.

This was my first LMA reading, so I'm going to say only that I was surprised by the comedic tone she took up early on and maintained throughout. I'm also intrigued by the adoption of the alter ego, as though she required someone else to shift the responsibility to when things got gruesome or disgusting or plain ridiculous. Suggests to me a kind of splitting that she might have observed others doing, maybe her (then) larger-than-life father (whom she would come to overshadow in fame and fortune, as she details in the final letter). That's me psychoanalyzing LMA through her book, but if it's a memoir, I'm welcome to. Even if it's fiction, I can if I want. :)

In 1862, at age 30, Louisa May Alcott intended to serve as a nurse in a Union hospital for three months. She only made it six weeks before she became ill with typhoid fever and had to go home.

During her time as a nurse, she had written letters home to her family about her experiences. Other people urged her to publish them. She fictionalized and changed them a bit, naming her heroine Tribulation Periwinkle. But the experiences were hers. The “sketches” were published in four parts in the Boston Commonwealth, an Abolitionist magazine edited by a friend of the family.

Louisa didn’t think much of the writings, and mainly hoped just to make a little money off them. But these sketches brought her writing to the public eye, though she had written for the Atlantic Monthly before. She was urged to compile the sketches in a book, so she added material to them and published them as her first book in 1863.

Though there are six chapters in the book, we don’t really get to see Nurse Periwinkle interact with the soldiers until the third. The first story, “Obtaining Supplies,” deals with her decision to go, saying good-bye to her family, and a lot of frustrating detours and obstacles before finding the right people to get her documentation, tickets, etc.

“A Forward Movement” tells of her travels to Washington by train and boat, including the sites she saw, people she encountered, problems, fears, and funny things experienced along the way.

Chapter 3, “A Day,” tells of her first day in the hospital where she was put to work right away. Within three days they received a large influx of wounded from Fredericksburg, and she was warned, “Now you will begin to see hospital life in earnest, for you won’t probably find time to sit down all day, and may think yourself fortunate if you get to bed by midnight.”

This chapter and the fourth, “A Night,” are the best in the book. “Nurse Periwinkle” tells of her experiences and the men she met and treated. Some of the encounters are touching, some are funny as she “entertained a belief that he who laughed most was surest of recovery.”

In the fifth chapter, “Off Duty,” she tells of becoming sick herself and isolated. They must not have realized she had typhoid fever yet, because she took walks in town, visited another hospital in much better shape than theirs, visited the Senate Chamber and other sites until bad weather and worsening symptoms forced her inside. Even then, she did mending while observing the goings-on outside from her window. Finally she was so ill that her father came to bring her home.

The last chapter, “Postscript,” includes answers to questions readers had asked but also more observations and stories. I especially liked one quote where she, “having known a sister’s sorrow,” sympathizes with a woman who lost her brother: “I just put my arms about her, and began to cry in a very helpless but hearty way; for, as I seldom indulge in this moist luxury, I like to enjoy it with all my might, when I do.”

Along with the tales of some of “our brave boys,” she writes of mismanagement at the hospital as well as poor treatment of Black people. She also tells of some of the doctors, some kind and thoughtful, some clinical and lacking in bedside manner.

I’d have to say I like her later writing better. But even here, her wit, keen observation, pathos, and humor shine through.