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.