Health and Healing in America

I look forward to our in-person meeting this week, especially as I’m eager to hear your responses to our reading.

Do bring the Rutkow book with you so we can review the recent chapters we’ve read (Chapters 5-7), but we will probably spend most of our time talking about a remarkable account of being a Civil War nurse in Washington D.C. written by Louisa May Alcott (author of Little Women) in 1863, titled “Hospital Sketches.” It’s slightly fictionalized; she calls herself “Tribulation Periwinkle” and disguises some of the other names, but the place and her experiences were very real.

First, some background information: click here to see her muster roll card in the collection of the National Archives, and click here to learn a little about the formidable woman who was in charge of the volunteer nursing corps, Dorothea Dix.

Next, read Alcott’s narrative itself; it’s divided into 6 chapters and should be a fairly quick read. I’ll link here to two versions (same words, take your pick): plain-text online or a digitized original book (just the first 91 pages; the rest is a different book). Take good notes for our discussion of what she did (and didn’t do) as a nurse, her training (such as it was), and the hospital conditions and medical practices.

Journal Prompt #4. By class time on Wednesday, March 5th, please post a 500-word journal response on Blackboard that addresses some or all of these questions (these will be the basis for our in-class discussion as well, so you might want to bring your journal entry as a printed paper to serve as notes for our discussion):

What can Alcott’s narrative tell us about nursing in the 19th century?
What does it reveal about IDEAS of health and sickness at that time?
What can a document like this NOT tell us? What questions might it leave unanswered or unresolved?
If you were Nurse Periwinkle’s supervisor or colleague, how would you assess her nursing skills and performance?
According to Rutkow, the era in which Alcott was working as a volunteer nurse was prior to the emergence of “modern medicine” and professional authority. Does her account seem, in your professional opinion, to be completely foreign to your own experiences or are there some similarities that may have surprised you?