Louisa May Alcott Goes to War

Eager to support the North, the budding author volunteered for a fledgling corps of female nurses.

From a story on History Net...

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 1863 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 1980), wrote asking her family to come and take her home. Ropes herself subsequently fell ill and died on January 20. The next day Louisa agreed to let her father take her home.

Often delusional (and perhaps poisoned by the mercury-laced calomel she'd 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 1863.

To Alcott's 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. It too turned out to be a success with a public hungry for news about its "boys." The volume was reprinted again in 1869 with additional material, as Hospital Sketches and Camp and Fireside Stories, and again did well, selling another 3,000 copies.

In retrospect, Alcott's 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.