Unusually associated with the army, bouts of homesickness appear in the tale “On Picket Duty” (1864), revealing the personal defeats and emotions of the soldiers and making the thought of their sweethearts oddly overlap with the realities of war: “I don’t know where she is, and camp is all I’ve got” ( On Picket Duty and Other Tales 14). On August 28, 1863, Hospital Sketches was reprinted in book form by the abolitionist/reformer James Redpath in the series of Civil War fiction “Camp and Fireside Stories,” mostly meant to entertain the troops and to inform their relatives about camp life. The tome was much praised by Sergeant Garth Wilkinson James-one of Henry James, Sr.’s sons- and by William Dean Howells, Consul in Venice, who sent his support and congratulated Nurse Tribulation Periwinkle. Those letters and reports have not survived in the original form but were re-elaborated by the writer in a first-person narrative that the abolitionist/philanthropist Frank Sanborn published in the Boston Commonwealth between May and June 1863. In this endeavor she was also sustained by the daily reports she handed in to her Superintendents, according to the protocol established by Florence Nightingale. At the Union Hotel Hospital, she cured the casualties of Fredericksburg and based her Hospital Sketches on her letters home, “written on inverted tin kettles, in my pantry, while waiting for gruel to warm or poultices to cool, for boys to wake and be tormented, on stairs, in window seats & other sequestered spots favorable to literary inspiration” (Letter home of Novemin The Selected Letters 95). Coobiddy” ( Hospital Sketches 3).ĢAlcott took her place in the Union Hospital at Georgetown where for six weeks she worked untiringly under trying conditions. Her recruitment into the Union army is fully documented by her neighbor Sophia Hawthorne, who, in a letter to her daughter Una, refers to the soldier "Louisa Alcott” going to Fredericksburg, that is, “to the very mouth of the war.” 1 In the semi-autobiographical account of her nursing experience, when her sister urges her to marry, the narrator replies: "Can't afford expensive luxuries, Mrs. Before quitting, she studied how to cure injuries with the help of manuals such as Gun Shot Wounds by Doctor Home, often written by women who circulated the new nursing techniques inspired by Florence Nightingale’s Notes on Nursing (1860). Dix, Louisa May Alcott worked in an army hospital of Germantown (Washington, D.C.) for six long months, taking care of wounded soldiers until typhoid fever forced her to return to Concord. ![]() Appointed by the Superintendent Dorothea L. ![]() As nurses in the fields, they left their homes and families to bring domestic values inherited by their “Republican mothers” to the war. That brotherly fight constrained women in auxiliary roles but also introduced a growing army of charitable ladies to a new style of nursing that served to consolidate them as active agents of reform. 1In her early war tales, Louisa May Alcott adopted humor and satire to represent the grim realities of the Civil War.
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