My Name Is Mary Sutter by Robin Oliveira
Mary Sutter, 21, is a midwife in Albany, NY. She petitions to be admitted to the Albany Medical College, but is rejected, only because she is a woman. She asks a local surgeon, James Blevens, to train her as she dreams of being a surgeon, but response is the same. She can’t be a surgeon as a woman.
In Washington City, Dorothea Dix convinces President Lincoln to hire women as nurses for the Union Army.
Mary reads an ad in newspaper about the need for female nurses.
She makes her way to Washington City and gets a position doing whatever is needed at the Union Hotel converted into a hospital. She is prepared to do whatever it takes to be a surgeon. But what she is not prepared for is to witness how inadequate surgery is. How barbaric it is.
The same thoughts cloud over surgeon William Stipp. Back in school they were “given manuals and instruments and nothing else. If the army had been smart, they would have sent for surgeons from England, all those doctors from the Crimean War who had already treated these injuries and would have known what to do.”
As the war progresses, it brings even darker clouds over how unprepared medically they are. “…I have no faith in these new arrivals (surgeons). Most haven’t seen a scalpel since medical school, if they ever saw one there.”
The devastation and shortages of everything make the summer of 1862 to be remembered as the Great Scramble, “the summer when it was impossible to keep track of anything.”
Despite the hardship, Mary persists with her dream.
The story vividly brings the dilemma of inadequate medical training, surgeons not well-trained to perform amputations. And the author skillfully sets this dilemma against the backdrop of the Civil War. The story overall is interesting and gives a picture of how far medicine has gone since then.
@FB/BestHistoricalFiction
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