Louisa May Alcott. Eager to support the North, the budding author volunteered for a fledgling corps of female nurses. For generations of Americans, Louisa May Alcott has been revered as the author of Little Women 1. Concord, Massachusetts, while their father served in the Civil War. In Little Women and its equally popular sequels, Alcott was clearly the model for her heroine, Jo March, the rebellious tomboy who grows up to be a writer. Its no surprise, therefore, that she is chiefly remembered today as the author of childrens books. The real Louisa May Alcott was a much more complex and interesting figure. To earn a living she pennedunder a pseudonymlurid and even racy stories with titles like Paulines Peril and Punishment for popular magazines. In addition, she wrote serious novels for adults. But she was also a lifelong advocate for social reform, championing abolitionism as well as womens rights. Perhaps the least well known aspect of her surprising career is that she volunteered to serve as a nurse in the Civil War. She nearly died from a disease she contracted during that period, and she later wrote one of the first memoirs to draw the publics attention to conditions in the military hospitals and chronicle the suffering endured by wounded soldiers. When the war broke out, the Alcotts, like many other New England families, regarded the sectional conflict as a glorious crusade to end slavery. Unlike the fictional Mr. March of Little Women, Louisas father Bronson Alcott, a philosopher, educational reformer and Transcendentalist who had long battled financial woes, was over 6. But his second daughterwho was by then approaching 3. Union cause. Given what we know about Louisas tomboy leanings, it seems only natural that she refused to be satisfied with knitting socks and sewing bandages, choosing instead to volunteer for the Unions fledgling corps of female nurses. At the wars outbreak there were no female nurses, and the medical departments of both the Union and Confederate armies were woefully unprepared for the torrent of casualties from wounds and disease that soon overwhelmed them. The only nursing care was provided by convalescent soldiers. Women began traveling to the battlefields and hospitals to try to aid their loved ones. Many of the conflicts most famous nurses began this way, including Mother Mary Ann Bickerdyke, who was so revered by Union troops that she was invited by William T. Sherman to ride in the Grand Review in Washington at the wars end. Inspired by the example of Englands Florence Nightingale during the Crimean War, women also pressed to serve formally. Despite resistance from the military medical establishment, by August 1. Still, it was not until the summer of 1. Surgeon General William Hammond issued Circular No. That order became the template for Dorothea Dix, the first supervisor of Nurses. Only matronly women between 3. No formal training was required since none was available, only a capacity to care for the sick. Dix had once worked as an assistant in Bronson Alcotts Temple School in Boston, so it was not difficult for Louisa to secure an appointment. In early December 1. Union forces at Fredericksburg, she reported for duty at the ramshackle Union Hotel in Washington, which had been hastily converted into a hospital. Her plunge into the reality of war was swift, since casualties from the battlewhich she referred to as the Burnside blunderwere streaming in. As she relates in her memoir, Hospital Sketches There they were In they came, some on stretchers, some in mens arms, some feebly staggering along propped on rude crutches, and one lay stark and still with covered face, as a comrade gave his name to be recorded before they carried him away to the dead house. One can only imagine how shocking this introduction to the brutal aftermath of combat was for Alcott. But she quickly settled into hospital routineswashing and feeding the wounded, and following the surgeons on their rounds to change dressings and administer what few medicines were available. Much of the nurses time, of course, was devoted to providing whatever comfort they could to the soldiers, reading to them, writing letters, talking and listening to them, and holding their hands while the doctors probed their woundswithout benefit of anesthetics. In hospitals as well as in the field, the greatest danger to soldiers and caregivers alike was disease. Less than one month after she took up her duties in Washington, in early January 1. Alcott came down with typhoid pneumonia. At first she stubbornly tried to keep up with her duties, despite a high fever and racking cough, but she soon was confined to bed. Even then she continued to write letters and sew for the soldiers until she became dangerously ill. Her supervisor, Hannah Ropes whose own Civil War letters and diary were finally published in 1. Ropes herself subsequently fell ill and died on January 2. The next day Louisa agreed to let her father take her home. Often delusional and perhaps poisoned by the mercury laced calomel shed been dosed with, Alcott was not well enough to leave the house until spring. But as soon as she could work, at the urging of friends and family she set about revising for publication the letters she had sent and the journal she had kept. Hospital Sketches first appeared in the Boston Commonwealth, a weekly newspaper, in four installments in May and June 1. To Alcotts surprise, the sketches proved to be extraordinarily popular, and were quickly reprinted in newspapers across the North. Two publishers vied to produce an expanded version in book form, which appeared in hardcover that August. Index to Poems, Chronologically Lines written as a School Exercise Extract from the Conclusion of a Poem Written in very Early Youth An Evening Walk. It too turned out to be a success with a public hungry for news about its boys. The volume was reprinted again in 1. Hospital Sketches and Camp and Fireside Stories, and again did well, selling another 3,0. In retrospect, Alcotts illness could be viewed as a fortunate outcome of her brief service, for it meant she was invalided out of nursing relatively early in the conflict Sketches was in print before the Battle of Gettysburg and enabled her to be first in the field with a firsthand account of how wounded troops were treated. Many nurses served longer and under more trying conditions than Alcott, and after the war some of them produced more substantial memoirs. But the wars scale and the extent of its casualties were still sinking in with the public when Alcotts Hospital Sketches first appeared. Then too, Alcott was a skilled writer who knew how to make her sketches vivid and entertaining as well as realistic. She cast herself as a kind of Dickensian characterNurse Tribulation Periwinkleand alternated grim accounts of suffering soldiers with descriptions of her own travels, sketches of wartime Washington and self deprecating accounts of her encounters with staff and patients. Still, one suspects that it was Alcotts empathy for the wounded that made Hospital Sketches so popular. The centerpiece of her memoir is a passage describing the sufferings of John Suhre, a Virginia blacksmith with an iron constitution and a bullet wound through his lungs. After examining him, the surgeon left it to Alcott to tell him that his wounds were fatal. Though Suhres sufferings were protracted, he bore them in silence and good spirits. When the end finally came days later, Alcott relates, he held my hand close, so close that when he was asleep at last, I could not draw it away. Prparez votre voyage grce aux recommandations des voyageurs. Partagez votre exprience et comparez les prix sur MonNuage. Failure is unimportant. It takes courage to make a fool of yourself. Charlie Chaplin. Throughout history, there have been thousands of famous failures.