Mary Sutter is a brilliant young midwife in Albany who really wants to become a surgeon, but no one will accept her as an apprentice. Her twin sister Jenny married the man Mary is in love with and is now pregnant with his child. Mary is struggling with her feelings and really doesn’t want to see her sister grow bigger with the child. Thomas, Jenny’s husband, and Christopher, Jenny and Mary’s brother, have joined the army against the south. When she finds a call for nurses by Dorothea Dix, she flees home and travels to Washington DC. However, Ms Dix will not hire her as a nurse because she is not yet 30 years old. Mary is very disappointed with this, and eventually finds a job as a charwoman in a hospital.
Her circumstances change when she assist Dr Stipp with a leg amputation one day, and she starts working as a nurse while still scrubbing the floors etc. Meanwhile her mother Amelia keeps sending Mary letters begging her to come home to help with Jenny’s delivery. Mary ignores her mother’s pleas until the very last moment. When she arrives home, the doctor has already used the forceps and things go tragically wrong.
Mary returns to Washington DC but not to nursing initially. Both Amelia and Thomas blame her for their loss and Mary is heartbroken.
Mary and Stipp end up working in a barn, near the front where she takes her first steps to becoming a surgeon. In fact, she amputates more than 30 legs a day at one point. Then one day Thomas appears on her table….
This book took me a while to read. I wasn’t drawn in immediately but after a few chapters, I found myself thinking about the book when I wasn’t reading. I liked Mary, she’s a stubborn young woman who knows what she wants. As I’m not American, I know only bits about the American Civil War. This book has given me more insight into that period.
Read for the ShelfReflection Reading Challenge 2025
Prompt 40: A book with an assassination OR set in the Civil War
Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
