Alcott Readathon 2018: Hospital Sketches
"It is by no means faultless, but it fastens itself upon the mind and heart of the reader."
-Springfield Daily Republican
"The wit, the humor, the power of brief and vivid description which the volume evinces, will give it a wide popularity."
-The Wide World
"There are some passages in this little volume which will move the heart to tears as irresistibly as the humor of others will move the voice to laughter."
-The New England Farmer
Hospital Sketches (1863) was published first in newspapers and then as a book, to mostly glowing reviews. It is based on Alcott's brief time as a nurse with the names changed. The protagonist is called Tribulation Periwinkle but I couldn't help but refer to her as Louisa.
I'm leaving a lot out of this recap so that if you read it there will still be surprises.
Chapter 1: Obtaining Supplies
The book opens with something I had forgotten - Nurse Periwinkle has two sisters and a brother Tom. Tom suggests she try nursing after she rejects other family suggestions of writing a book, teaching, marrying, and acting. A neighbor introduces her to a nurse and she receives her comission. "A certain dear old lady" cries while saying good-bye to "topsy-turvy Trib."
She's entitled to a free railroad pass and spends 5 pages searching for the right place to get it. Haven't we all been there? After acquiring it she compares herself to Christian in Pilgrim's Progress "when the Evangelist gave him the scroll." Before the train leaves she visits her sister "Mrs. Joan Coobiddy" at the Dove-cote.
Chapter 2: A Forward Movement
Train ride.
"Very comfortable; munch gingerbread, and Mrs. C.'s fine pear, which deserves honorable mention, because my first loneliness was comforted by it, and pleasant recollections of both kindly sender and bearer. Look much at Dr. H.'s paper of directions-put my tickets in every conceivable place, that they may be get-at-able, and finish by losing them entirely. Suffer agonies till a compassionate neighbor pokes them out of a crack with his pen-knife. Put them in the inmost corner of my purse, that in the deepest recesses of my pocket, pile a collection of miscellaneous articles 22 atop, and pin up the whole. Just get composed, feeling that I've done my best to keep them safely, when the Conductor appears, and I'm forced to rout them all out again, exposing my precautions, and getting into a flutter at keeping the man waiting. Finally, fasten them on the seat before me, and keep one eye steadily upon the yellow torments, till I forget all about them, in chat with the gentleman who shares my seat. Having heard complaints of the absurd way in which American women become images of petrified propriety, if addressed by strangers, when traveling alone, the inborn perversity of my nature causes me to assume an entirely opposite style of deportment; and, finding my companion hails from Little Athens, is acquainted with several of my three hundred and sixty-five cousins, and in every way a respectable and respectful member of society, I put my bashfulness in my pocket, and plunge into a long conversation on the war, the weather, music, Carlyle, skating, genius, hoops, and the immortality of the soul."
Knowing LMA I imagine she doesn't approve of hoops.
Then a boat. She doesn't want to sleep as she has "tice escaped a watery grave" and won't press her luck a third time. Because I'm a nerd I can identify both times. When she was a little girl she fell into a pond and a black man rescued her. In 1858 she was looking for work in Boston and finding it difficult, she considered drowning heself into the Back Bay. And it turns out I spoke too soon - Nurse P is in fact wearing a hoop.
Another train. Passes through Philly where "few men appear, and the women seem to do the business, shich, perhaps, accounts for its being so well done." Misandry! In Baltimore a coupling iron, whatever that is, breaks, and the train stops for a repair. Her first sight of Washington D. C. takes LMA's breath away.
Chapter 3: A Day
LMA's fourth day at "Hurlyburly House." It always strikes me, reading history, how little formal education was required for getting a job.
Forty ambulances arrive from Fredericksburg. Our heroine is momentarily taken aback at being told to strip and wash soldiers but follows orders. A lad with one leg and one arm provides some gallows humor.
"I've been in six scrimmages, and never got a scratch till this last one; but it's done the business pretty thoroughly for me, I should say. Lord! what a scramble there'll be for arms and legs, when we old boys come out of our graves, on the Judgment Day: wonder if we shall get our own again? If we do, my leg will have to tramp from Fredericksburg, my arm from here, I suppose, and meet my body, wherever it may be."
We learn that nuts as slang was used in 1862.
A Confederate says he'll wash himself, provoking "angry passions" in LMA. She has no sympathy for him.
She filks The Charge of the Light Brigade:
"Beds to the front of them,
Beds to the right of them,
Beds to the left of them,
Nobody blundered.
Beamed at by hungry souls,
Screamed at with brimming bowls,
Steamed at by army rolls,
Buttered and sundered.
With coffee not cannon plied,
Each must be satisfied,
Whether they lived or died;
All the men wondered."
The doctors and nurses work non-stop from dawn til 11, with supper at 5. "The amount that some of them sequestered was amazing."
Chapter 4: A Night
An example of the tragic/comic mixture that is Alcott's trademark. She enjoys the night shift and learns to recognize each man's snore. A twelve year old drummer boy, Teddy, wakes up crying. It isn't pain - he dreamed about his friend Kit who died. Teddy was injured and Kit carried him wrapped up in blankets, so Teddy blames himself for weakening Kit. LMA assures him Kit would have died either way.
John, a blacksmith from Virginia, dictates a letter home. He has a ring so she asks if he's married. He says, no, his mother is a widow and so he must support her and act as surrogate father to his sister Lizzy and brother Laurie. LMA admires his manly courage and maternal devotion. He dies two days after, just before the reply arrives.
A man who lost his leg attempts to escape home, hopping all around and rambling, and a Prussian gentleman puts him back to bed.
Chapter 5: Off Duty
A surgeon urges her to rest lest he "have to add a Periwinkle to my bouquet of patients." Her room has broken windows, sheets for curtains, and rats that take the food.
For exercise she visits Armoury Hospital and describes how it's much more clean and organized than Hurlyburly House.
Another time she visits the Senate Chamber, but it isn't in session so she sits in Charles Sumner's chair, imagines herself cudgelling Preston Brooks, the guy who beat up Sumner for making an anti-slavery speech, and steals "a castaway autograph or two." Then she goes to an art museum and writes that "several robust ladies attracted me . . . but which was America and which Pocahontas was a mystery, for all affected much looseness of costume, dishevelment of hair, swords, arrows, lances, scales, and other ornaments quite passé with damsels of our day, whose effigies should go down to posterity armed 76 with fans, crochet needles, riding whips, and parasols, with here and there one holding pen or pencil, rolling-pin or broom."
Then it rains for a week and she's shut up in her room. The other nurses and her friends visit her, including Dorothea Dix.
As any of you who have read a biography of LMA know, she comes down typhoid and returns home.
"I never shall regret the going, though a sharp tussle with typhoid, ten dollars, and a wig, are all the visible results of the experiment; for one may live and learn much in a month." Only ten dollars? TEN? $2.50 a week? Frank Leslie paid her $50 a story.
Chapter 6: A Postscript
Answers to readers' letters. Are there churches services at the hospital? Yes, there is a chaplain but she finds his sermons dry and uninteresting.
"Regarding the admission of friends to nurse their sick, I can only say, it was not allowed at Hurly-burly House; though one indomitable parent took my ward by storm, and held her position, in spite of doctors, matron, and Nurse Periwinkle. Though it was against the rules, though the culprit was an acid, frost-bitten female, though the young man would have done quite as well without her anxious fussiness, and the whole room-full been much more comfortable, there was something so irresistible in this persistent devotion, that no one had the heart to oust her from her post. She slept on the floor, without uttering a complaint; bore jokes somewhat of the rudest; fared scantily, though her basket was daily filled with luxuries for her boy; and tended that petulant personage with a never-failing patience beautiful to see.
I feel a glow of moral rectitude in saying this of her; for, though a perfect pelican to her young, she pecked and cackled (I don't know that pelicans usually express their emotions in that manner,) most obstreperously, when others invaded her premises; and led me a weary life, with "George's tea-rusks," "George's foot-bath," "George's measles," and "George's mother;" till after a sharp passage of arms and tongues with the matron, she wrathfully packed up her rusks, her son, and herself, and departed, in an ambulance, scolding to the very last."
Nurses aren't required to witness amputations. LMA watched operations because she wanted to nurse at the front. The offer from Dr. Z to witness a dissection she turned down.
She was warned "to expect much humilation of spirit from the surgeons" but those she worked with didn't do that at all. They were very kind and when she was ill Dr. Z made sure she had firewood.
She refuses to give the hospital's real name - it has closed down and its patients moved to, she hopes, a place with better food.
This entry was originally posted at https://nocowardsoul.dreamwidth.org/38616.html
-Springfield Daily Republican
"The wit, the humor, the power of brief and vivid description which the volume evinces, will give it a wide popularity."
-The Wide World
"There are some passages in this little volume which will move the heart to tears as irresistibly as the humor of others will move the voice to laughter."
-The New England Farmer
Hospital Sketches (1863) was published first in newspapers and then as a book, to mostly glowing reviews. It is based on Alcott's brief time as a nurse with the names changed. The protagonist is called Tribulation Periwinkle but I couldn't help but refer to her as Louisa.
I'm leaving a lot out of this recap so that if you read it there will still be surprises.
Chapter 1: Obtaining Supplies
The book opens with something I had forgotten - Nurse Periwinkle has two sisters and a brother Tom. Tom suggests she try nursing after she rejects other family suggestions of writing a book, teaching, marrying, and acting. A neighbor introduces her to a nurse and she receives her comission. "A certain dear old lady" cries while saying good-bye to "topsy-turvy Trib."
She's entitled to a free railroad pass and spends 5 pages searching for the right place to get it. Haven't we all been there? After acquiring it she compares herself to Christian in Pilgrim's Progress "when the Evangelist gave him the scroll." Before the train leaves she visits her sister "Mrs. Joan Coobiddy" at the Dove-cote.
Chapter 2: A Forward Movement
Train ride.
"Very comfortable; munch gingerbread, and Mrs. C.'s fine pear, which deserves honorable mention, because my first loneliness was comforted by it, and pleasant recollections of both kindly sender and bearer. Look much at Dr. H.'s paper of directions-put my tickets in every conceivable place, that they may be get-at-able, and finish by losing them entirely. Suffer agonies till a compassionate neighbor pokes them out of a crack with his pen-knife. Put them in the inmost corner of my purse, that in the deepest recesses of my pocket, pile a collection of miscellaneous articles 22 atop, and pin up the whole. Just get composed, feeling that I've done my best to keep them safely, when the Conductor appears, and I'm forced to rout them all out again, exposing my precautions, and getting into a flutter at keeping the man waiting. Finally, fasten them on the seat before me, and keep one eye steadily upon the yellow torments, till I forget all about them, in chat with the gentleman who shares my seat. Having heard complaints of the absurd way in which American women become images of petrified propriety, if addressed by strangers, when traveling alone, the inborn perversity of my nature causes me to assume an entirely opposite style of deportment; and, finding my companion hails from Little Athens, is acquainted with several of my three hundred and sixty-five cousins, and in every way a respectable and respectful member of society, I put my bashfulness in my pocket, and plunge into a long conversation on the war, the weather, music, Carlyle, skating, genius, hoops, and the immortality of the soul."
Knowing LMA I imagine she doesn't approve of hoops.
Then a boat. She doesn't want to sleep as she has "tice escaped a watery grave" and won't press her luck a third time. Because I'm a nerd I can identify both times. When she was a little girl she fell into a pond and a black man rescued her. In 1858 she was looking for work in Boston and finding it difficult, she considered drowning heself into the Back Bay. And it turns out I spoke too soon - Nurse P is in fact wearing a hoop.
Another train. Passes through Philly where "few men appear, and the women seem to do the business, shich, perhaps, accounts for its being so well done." Misandry! In Baltimore a coupling iron, whatever that is, breaks, and the train stops for a repair. Her first sight of Washington D. C. takes LMA's breath away.
Chapter 3: A Day
LMA's fourth day at "Hurlyburly House." It always strikes me, reading history, how little formal education was required for getting a job.
Forty ambulances arrive from Fredericksburg. Our heroine is momentarily taken aback at being told to strip and wash soldiers but follows orders. A lad with one leg and one arm provides some gallows humor.
"I've been in six scrimmages, and never got a scratch till this last one; but it's done the business pretty thoroughly for me, I should say. Lord! what a scramble there'll be for arms and legs, when we old boys come out of our graves, on the Judgment Day: wonder if we shall get our own again? If we do, my leg will have to tramp from Fredericksburg, my arm from here, I suppose, and meet my body, wherever it may be."
We learn that nuts as slang was used in 1862.
A Confederate says he'll wash himself, provoking "angry passions" in LMA. She has no sympathy for him.
She filks The Charge of the Light Brigade:
"Beds to the front of them,
Beds to the right of them,
Beds to the left of them,
Nobody blundered.
Beamed at by hungry souls,
Screamed at with brimming bowls,
Steamed at by army rolls,
Buttered and sundered.
With coffee not cannon plied,
Each must be satisfied,
Whether they lived or died;
All the men wondered."
The doctors and nurses work non-stop from dawn til 11, with supper at 5. "The amount that some of them sequestered was amazing."
Chapter 4: A Night
An example of the tragic/comic mixture that is Alcott's trademark. She enjoys the night shift and learns to recognize each man's snore. A twelve year old drummer boy, Teddy, wakes up crying. It isn't pain - he dreamed about his friend Kit who died. Teddy was injured and Kit carried him wrapped up in blankets, so Teddy blames himself for weakening Kit. LMA assures him Kit would have died either way.
John, a blacksmith from Virginia, dictates a letter home. He has a ring so she asks if he's married. He says, no, his mother is a widow and so he must support her and act as surrogate father to his sister Lizzy and brother Laurie. LMA admires his manly courage and maternal devotion. He dies two days after, just before the reply arrives.
A man who lost his leg attempts to escape home, hopping all around and rambling, and a Prussian gentleman puts him back to bed.
Chapter 5: Off Duty
A surgeon urges her to rest lest he "have to add a Periwinkle to my bouquet of patients." Her room has broken windows, sheets for curtains, and rats that take the food.
For exercise she visits Armoury Hospital and describes how it's much more clean and organized than Hurlyburly House.
Another time she visits the Senate Chamber, but it isn't in session so she sits in Charles Sumner's chair, imagines herself cudgelling Preston Brooks, the guy who beat up Sumner for making an anti-slavery speech, and steals "a castaway autograph or two." Then she goes to an art museum and writes that "several robust ladies attracted me . . . but which was America and which Pocahontas was a mystery, for all affected much looseness of costume, dishevelment of hair, swords, arrows, lances, scales, and other ornaments quite passé with damsels of our day, whose effigies should go down to posterity armed 76 with fans, crochet needles, riding whips, and parasols, with here and there one holding pen or pencil, rolling-pin or broom."
Then it rains for a week and she's shut up in her room. The other nurses and her friends visit her, including Dorothea Dix.
As any of you who have read a biography of LMA know, she comes down typhoid and returns home.
"I never shall regret the going, though a sharp tussle with typhoid, ten dollars, and a wig, are all the visible results of the experiment; for one may live and learn much in a month." Only ten dollars? TEN? $2.50 a week? Frank Leslie paid her $50 a story.
Chapter 6: A Postscript
Answers to readers' letters. Are there churches services at the hospital? Yes, there is a chaplain but she finds his sermons dry and uninteresting.
"Regarding the admission of friends to nurse their sick, I can only say, it was not allowed at Hurly-burly House; though one indomitable parent took my ward by storm, and held her position, in spite of doctors, matron, and Nurse Periwinkle. Though it was against the rules, though the culprit was an acid, frost-bitten female, though the young man would have done quite as well without her anxious fussiness, and the whole room-full been much more comfortable, there was something so irresistible in this persistent devotion, that no one had the heart to oust her from her post. She slept on the floor, without uttering a complaint; bore jokes somewhat of the rudest; fared scantily, though her basket was daily filled with luxuries for her boy; and tended that petulant personage with a never-failing patience beautiful to see.
I feel a glow of moral rectitude in saying this of her; for, though a perfect pelican to her young, she pecked and cackled (I don't know that pelicans usually express their emotions in that manner,) most obstreperously, when others invaded her premises; and led me a weary life, with "George's tea-rusks," "George's foot-bath," "George's measles," and "George's mother;" till after a sharp passage of arms and tongues with the matron, she wrathfully packed up her rusks, her son, and herself, and departed, in an ambulance, scolding to the very last."
Nurses aren't required to witness amputations. LMA watched operations because she wanted to nurse at the front. The offer from Dr. Z to witness a dissection she turned down.
She was warned "to expect much humilation of spirit from the surgeons" but those she worked with didn't do that at all. They were very kind and when she was ill Dr. Z made sure she had firewood.
She refuses to give the hospital's real name - it has closed down and its patients moved to, she hopes, a place with better food.
This entry was originally posted at https://nocowardsoul.dreamwidth.org/38616.html