Audiobook · read by volunteers
Hospital Sketches
Louisa May Alcott (1832–1888)
Read by Aaron Elliott · 6 chapters · 3 h 08
About the book
In December 1862, Louisa May Alcott left her home in Massachusetts and travelled to Washington to nurse wounded soldiers in a crowded Union hospital. She was thirty years old, full of energy and rather unprepared for what she would find. The first chapters follow her preparations and her departure for Washington. These sketches, based on her letters home, take you through the cold, the smells, the long nights and the sorrow of that winter. Yet they are also very funny. Alcott describes the bossy matrons, the odd doctors and the courage and humour of the patients with an observant, mischievous eye. Speaking as Nurse Tribulation Periwinkle, she turns a harrowing experience into a lively and humane story. It is a short book, quick to listen to, and it offers a very personal view of the Civil War.
Introduction
Louisa May Alcott, born in 1832 and died in 1888, is best known as the author of Little Women. Before that success, she worked as a teacher, seamstress and writer of stories, and in 1862 she volunteered as a nurse during the American Civil War. After only a few weeks in a Georgetown hospital she fell seriously ill with typhoid fever and returned home, though she carried the effects of the illness for the rest of her life.
Hospital Sketches was published in 1863 and drew on the letters she had sent to her family. It first appeared in a Boston newspaper and then as a book, and it gave Alcott her first real recognition as a writer. The narrator is a fictionalised version of herself, Nurse Periwinkle, and her mixture of humour and compassion became a trademark of Alcott’s later work. The sketches are valued today both as literature and as a witness of the way ordinary people experienced the war.
This audiobook contains six chapters and lasts a little over three hours. It is read by a single LibriVox volunteer. If you know Alcott only through her novels for young readers, this is a good place to hear a different side of her: sharper, more candid and deeply moved by the suffering around her.
Alcott’s sketches show how the same writer who later charmed readers with March family warmth could also describe suffering unflinchingly. The mixture is what gives the book its special flavour: you laugh, and a moment later you are moved. It is a fine introduction to the Civil War as seen from the hospital ward.
Public domain
Louisa May Alcott died in 1888: the work is in the public domain in Switzerland, more than 70 years after the author’s death.
The LibriVox volunteers dedicated this recording to the public domain.
Sources : LibriVox page · Files at the Internet Archive · Original text