Her letters were collected and published later that year, then republished with additions in 1869.Since the letters were written to family and never intended to be published, Alcott received some initial criticism for her sometimes comic tone. Despite her protests, she was taken home after only six weeks of service. Unfortunately, Alcott caught typhoid fever and became very ill. True to her nature, she wrote long, witty letters home to her family, in which she describes her duties as an untrained nurse, the soldiers she meets, and the nature of the treatment available to the wounded. In late 1862, Alcott was sent to the Union Hospital in Georgetown, D.C. An abolitionist and feminist, the adventurous Alcott eagerly joined other young women in offering to be a nurse for the Union Army during the Civil War. Louisa May Alcott wrote many fictionalized books and stories about her life and family, the most famous of which is. What finally alleviates her troubled mind is the sight of an overweight lady, because bearing in mind that “fat girls float best”, she (the future nurse) would make a beeline for the lady and hold onto her if the boat went down.An insightful and amusing read. Either way, the frustration she goes through is retold in a humorous way, causing me to laugh aloud more than once.A particular funny part is when the nurse-to-be is about to sleep whilst sailing and she’s concerned about the vessel going down during the night. I don’t know how much of this really happened to Ms Alcott, though I suspect most if not all are true recollections. The nonsense she has to endure to get from A to B and back again is a classic case of the left hand not knowing what the right is doing. The author – or technically speaking, the “narrator”, who’s really Ms Alcott in disguise – sums up my above feelings in this quote:“Certainly, nothing was set down in malice, and to the serious-minded party who objected to a tone of levity in some portions of the Sketches, I can only say that it is a part of my religion to look well after the cheerfulnesses of life, and let the dismals shift for themselves.”The light tone is most apparent in the scenes before the want-to-be nurse starts work at the hospital.
Of course there are upsetting scenes where soldiers are so severely wounded that they have a short period of agony before death releases them, yet despite this, the senses of hope and bravery prevent the mood from becoming depressing, while the upbeat narration eliminates any feelings of morbidity. Here we have Louisa May Alcott’s semi-autobiographical account of her times as a nurse and the events leading up to her securing her position at the hospital.I’d been in two minds whether to read this text for some time, thinking it would be too morbid and depressing, but before finishing the first page I knew I’d misjudged the book by its title. “Hospital Sketches” essentially reads as a tragic comedy.
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