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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Interesting to read from the perspectice of being a nursing student. Although i am not dealing with people who are damaged as the result of war, patients, nurses and doctors still seem to be consistent in variety and nature.

I could NOT get into this at all. I think it may have been the way it was written, but I had zero interest from start to finish. While it was interesting to get a glimpse into how Civil War hospitals were run, as well as how the women who worked in them were treated, I found the entire book dreary and incredibly dull.

Louisa May Alcott served as a nurse at a hospital in Georgetown during the Civil War, and Hospital Sketches is a collection of sketched of her time there. She writes about the soldiers in her care, the other doctors and nurses she works with, and the general day to day operation of a Union military hospital. These sketches are a really good look at this experience, though they feel a little sanitized. She does admit in the book’s opening chapter that they are a lighter take on her experience, presented this way to show a truer picture of daily life in the hospital. There is a particularly poignant chapter sharing the decline and death of of a solider in her care where Alcott’s gift for depicting human relationships is at her best. Warning though, there is a bit of racism in parts of this book, in how Alcott talks about the black people living and working in Georgetown. Though she and her family were abolitionists their attitudes about black people are not automatically enlightened.

I struggled to get going with this as the tone seemed rather juvenile. I also found it overall rather shallow. I appreciate that it may well have been "censored" because of the ongoing war and to spare LM's family, but this seemed like a missed opportunity. It was worth reading though because of a couple of key impressions - one about the slow death of a young man from his injuries who LM clearly developed a close bond with. The second on the true state of race relations in the north, and LM's enlightened attitudesfor the time.

I picked up this book while visiting The Alcott home last summer. I finally got a chance to read it this summer and I loved it! Oddly enough, I spent much of the short book laughing out loud. Who knew Civil War hospitals could be funny! Alcott uses rich language and humor to write about a nurse's struggles while working at a hospital during 1863. The nurse's time spent at the hospital definitely has its up and downs! While I did chuckle quite a bit, the harsh reality of war is evident throughout the text as well as the pain endured by the soldiers and the nursing staff who supported them after the battles. A must read for any Civil War enthusiast of history teacher!

I know I missed the boat on this, because I only ever read an abridged/adapted version of Little Women, but Louisa May Alcott is funny. I got this from Project Gutenberg due to my recent renewed interest in Civil War medicine, and was utterly delighted by it.

I really enjoyed this. The writing is funny and tender; it's like something that Jo March would have written. But then how could you go wrong with a name like Tribulation Periwinkle?? :)