Hospital Sketches

Several years before Louisa May Alcott createdLittle Women(1868), her most well known novel, she worked as a nurse at a soldiers' hospital in Washington, D.C., during the Civil War. Drawing on that experience, Alcott wroteHospital Sketches(1863), a vivid account that offers rich insights into women's wartime roles, the shocking conditions in soldiers' hospitals, the lives of the soldiers themselves, and the racial prejudice of the time. Part of a vast outpouring of popular Civil War literature published during the conflict,Hospital Sketchestells us much about mid-nineteenth-century literary culture and the ways in which the war was re-created in literature for the reading public in the North. Alice Fahs's introduction supplies biographical, literary, and historical context for Alcott's work. Illustrations, a chronology, questions for consideration, and a selected bibliography add to the volume's value.Fahs, Alice is the author of 'Hospital Sketches', published 2003 under ISBN 9780312260286 and ISBN 0312260288.