I have been a huge reader ALL of my life. The first book I ever read to myself was Ferdinand the Bull about the bull who would rather smell flowers under his favorite cock tree than fight in the arena. The first book I ever stayed up all night to read was Magic’s Pawn by Mercedes Lackey when I was a sophomore in high school (shhh, don’t tell my parents). The first chapter book that I ever read by myself was Little Women by Louisa May Alcott.
We’ve all seen the various movie adaptations where various actresses spanning generations played Jo, the headstrong March daughter. These actresses vary from Katharine Hepburn to Saoirse Ronan, seven in all from 1918-2019. Her story remains the same. So does the story of the doomed March sister, Beth March, the gentle soul that contracted scarlet fever while providing care for a poor family in their town.
But as a child and teenager I read all the Louisa May Alcott books I could get my hands on. Little Women, Good Wives, Little Men, Jo’s Boys. I own a very old copy of Aunt Jo’s Scrap Bag that I got in an antique store in Wyoming. These are the books that dealt with the March sisters. There are also more like the Eight Cousins or the Aunt-Hill, Rose in Bloom, Under the Lilacs and Jack & Jill. This last book was written in 1880 and the Jill of the title was a poor girl who had a friendship with Jack of the title while they were young. Through childhood misadventures she tumbled down and broke her back, like the nursery rhyme while Jack got a bump on the noggin.
Louisa May Alcott desperately wanted to go to war and wanted to enlist but she was denied because she was a woman. She volunteered as a nurse during the Civil War in 1962 and was confronted by the dirty, nasty, medical mess that accompanies war. She served only 6 weeks of her 3 month assignment, becoming seriously ill herself. She sent home stories that were compiled into Hospital Sketches in 1863.
I had no idea this novella existed until I heard about it on an NPR program about Louisa May Alcott. The library didn’t have it but Amazon did and I purchased it immediately. It is a little book, only 99 pages. I am glad that I didn’t read this book until I was an adult and a working nurse. Because my 24 years in the hospital trenches allowed me to understand Tribulation and to empathize with her.
It is about a woman in the 1862 who is bored. This is Tribulation Periwinkle. She doesn’t want to teach, or write, or get married, or act. Her little brother suggests that she go to war. And she does.
Although not without difficulties or barriers in her way. The battlefields were a long way from New York.
While nursing the desperately wounded, Tribulation has conversations with the dying soldiers. One dismisses his injury as just being shot in the stomach and wishes for a drink of water. But there was no water to be had as the water pails were being filled. Tribulation took the first mug and hurried back to her patient patient, who was dead. There is something about the description of the patient patient who is patiently waiting for water that never comes.
Louisa May Alcott touches on the senselessness of war and the unceasing dying of the soldiers. She writes of families that are holding vigil at bedside for those who were dying. She writes of sitting vigil herself and the conversations that she had with the wounded.
Tribulation Periwinkle goes home and writes about the surgeons and the patients and the other nurses. The last paragraph in the book is about her wish to volunteer at a hospital for “colored regiments” because she knows that society owes them a great debt.
A little book, yes, and a bit disjointed, but it really gives a snapshot of what it was like serving in the Civil War battlefield hospitals. Some good, a lot of bad.
Rather like today. Even with all of our pharmacological advancements and surgical advancements and technological advancements we sometimes don’t in. And Louisa May Alcott knew that.
Dispatches from the Evening Shift 