Angels of the Battlefield gathers Civil War writings that illuminate medicine as both an emergency practice and a moral crucible. Through memoir, reportage, recollection, and eyewitness testimony, the volume ranges from intimate accounts of nursing and hospital routine to searching descriptions of military sanitation, suffering, and survival. Its selections reveal the frontlines not only as sites of combat but as improvised worlds of care, where courage was measured in endurance, skill, an...

""Ten o'clock! I must press on, or they'll all be in bed, I suppose. Beastly respectable, old Carruthers, from what I can make out from my mother, and what little I saw of him! Servants up to prayers and all that kind of thing. No chance of getting hold of her, if I can't make her know I am there, before those prayers come off. Glass of cold water and flat candlestick directly they're over, I suppose, and a kiss to Missy and God bless you all round, and off to bed! By George, what a life! ...

Compassion under Fire: Heroes of Healing in the Civil War gathers ten vivid accounts of caregiving amid the United States' most devastating nineteenth-century conflict. Spanning memoir, reminiscence, reportage, medical observation, and wartime narrative, the collection charts the improvised hospitals, battlefield relief networks, domestic labors, and moral crises that sustained soldiers and civilians alike. Its standout scenes of nursing under bombardment, confronting disease, and organizi...