10 books like Kate Cumming's Civil War Journal

This volume offers a survey of Civil War nurses in both the North and the South. Not only do readers meet individuals like Clara Barton, but readers get an overview of pioneering women in this field, with detailed statistics not found in memoirs.

Early in the war, writer Louisa May Alcott journeyed to the nation’s capital to care for sick and wounded soldiers. Over a period of six weeks, she experienced firsthand the rigors of life in crowded hospital wards as a nurse to men suffering from disease and wounds. She recorded her observations in a series of accounts printed in a Boston newspaper. These writings formed the basis of Hospital Sketches. Published a month after the end of the Battle of Gettysburg, when the outcome of the war remained uncertain, Alcott’s words encouraged other women to support the U.S. war effort, and remind us today of the critical role of nurses in times of conflict.

This book captures the work of the little-known U.S. Sanitary Commission, the pre-cursor to the Red Cross, and its influence during the Peninsula Campaign of 1862. Women nurses were the lifeblood of the hospital transports that saved hundreds of lives.

Many African American women served as nurses, especially in the South, as Susie King Taylor did. But their stories have largely gone unrecorded. This memoir adds an important perspective to any consideration of Civil War nurses.

The death toll of the Civil War was horrendous, the list of the wounded? Endless. Medical schools did not exist; doctor trained their assistants. There were no emergency rooms, no hospitals, no triage, and certainly no female nurses to care for those bleeding male bodies. In many respects, the medical profession was born on Civil War battlefields with the brave women who ventured among the dead and dying to staunch the flow of blood. So, who were the women who emerged from their sheltered lives to care for wounded soldiers in the Northern army? I wrote about one of them—Nellie Chase—but I thought she was an exception. These stories of the women who joined the Northern war effort expanded my knowledge beyond my wildest expectations.

Daniel Mason’s The Winter Soldier is superb. I love its wonderfully drawn characters and visual details, its sense of medical authenticity, its depiction of the convolutions of history—in this case, the Austro-Hungarian Empire’s side of things in WWI. It’s all held within a heart-wrenching narrative about a Viennese medical student assigned to a distant field hospital in the Carpathian Mountains. What he finds is a village church turned into a makeshift hospital with a single nurse in charge. The author, a physician, creates so well the terror of a medical student facing, for the first time, what his textbooks couldn’t convey—the awful effects of war upon the human body and mind. Nor could those textbooks show what love and atonement feel like. The Winter Soldier does.  

Studies since the publication of the book have found it to be in error on a few minor points (e.g., the DNA encoding the Shiga-like toxin of E. coli O157:H7 is on a virus infecting the E. coli cells, not on a plasmid), but that doesn’t make the story outdated. The toxin is as nasty as it is portrayed, no matter how the E. coli acquired it, and the blame leveled at the meat-packing industry and the USDA for the contamination that causes the problem is spot on. The only reason the disease isn’t more common is that most fast-food restaurants deliberately overcook their hamburgers.

So great was the demand for hospital beds for the wounded, that medical facilities were a feature of most of Britain's cities, part of daily civilian life. At the heart of London's Covent Garden was the Endell Street Hospital, run entirely by women whose medical expertise and skill was matched by their direct experience of the war itself. But their achievements and experience were wasted after the war by a medical profession that reverted all too easily to pre-war prejudice and discrimination. Much was lost, especially to their patients whose recovery prospects were damaged, never to be restored.

I am not recommending a particular volume or compilation. In general I love the work of Harvey Pekar.  He has brought me closer to Documentary Comics than any other author. He worked with reflections and anecdotes and was one of those authors that from the writing was able to defy the common places in comics making. Yes, he was a scriptwriter, but he pulled out so many amazing comics from the graphic formula and made them work. I remember seeing gigantic balloons with blocks of text. Pages and pages of close-ups, and they weren’t boring.  A comic about him reflecting on his masculinity by unclogging the toilet. Amazing.

Beyond the usual five stages of grief—denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance—a sixth stage of heavy responsibility may develop when someone dies in the service of a great cause. As the Battle of Franklin played out in the yard of her Carnton Plantation, Carrie MccGavock felt that sense of obligation to the 9000 soldiers who died in that battle. It is in that sense that Carrie called herself the “Widow of the South.” She disinterred over 1000 anonymous bodies, identified them, reburied them in her own cemetery, and sought to give their families a sense of closure. This moving novel, based on a true story, reminds us that the Civil War was more than maps and casualty statistics. It is a story of heartbreak and devotion.