Theme: Louisa May Alcott- her life and work

Dix had as soon as labored as an assistant in Bronson Al¬cott’s Temple School in Boston, so it was now not tough for Louisa to tightly closed an appointment. In early December 1862, truely after the disastrous defeat of Union forces at Fredericksburg, she pronounced for duty at the ramshackle Union Hotel in Washington, which had been rapidly changed into a hospital. Her plunge into the truth of struggle used to be swift, considering casualties from the battle—which she referred to as “the Burnside blunder”—were streaming in. As she relates in her memoir, Hospi¬tal Sketches:

There they were! “our brave boys,” as the papers justly title them, for cowards should infrequently have been so riddled with shot and shell, so torn and shattered, nor have borne struggling for which we have no name, with an uncomplaining fortitude….In they came, some on stretchers, some in men’s arms, some feebly remarkable alongside propped on rude crutches, and one lay stark and still with blanketed face, as a comrade gave his discover to be recorded earlier than they carried him away to the useless house.

One can fully suppose about how stunning this introduction to the brutal aftermath of fight used to be for Alcott. But she rapidly settled into clinic routines—washing and feeding the wounded, and following the surgeons on their rounds to change dressings and administer what few drugs had been available. Much of the nurses’ time, of course, used to be committed to imparting some thing alleviation they ought to to the soldiers, analyzing to them, writing letters, speakme and listening to them, and conserving their arms whilst the doctors probed their wounds—without gain of anesthetics.

In hospitals as properly as in the field, the best threat to soldiers and caregivers alike used to be disease. Less than one month after she took up her tasks in Washington, in early January 1863 Alcott bought right here down with typhoid pneumonia. At first she stubbornly tried to maintain up with her duties, in spite of a excessive fever and racking cough, on the other hand she soon was once restrained to bed. Even then she persevered to write letters and sew for the troopers until she grew to be dangerously ill. Her supervisor, Hannah Ropes (whose own Civil War letters and diary have been sooner or later published in 1980), wrote asking her family to come and take her home. Ropes herself due to this reality fell ill and died on January 20. The next day Louisa agreed to let her father take her home.Often delusional (and per chance poisoned with the useful resource of the mercury-laced calomel she’d been dosed with), Alcott was once no longer good adequate to leave the house until spring. But as quickly as she ought to work, at the urging of buddies and family she set about revising for booklet the letters she had sent and the journal she had kept. Hospital Sketches first viewed in the Boston Commonwealth, a weekly newspaper, in four installments in May and June 1863.