Welcome to the Project Gutenberg presentation of Hospital Sketches.
We used the 1863 version of the book for this transcription. A scanned copy of this book is available through Hathitrust, courtesy of Duke University.
We tried to preserve the original spelling of words, punctuation, and italics in the Sketches. Changes to the text are listed below, in the Detailed Notes. The Detailed Notes includes other issues that have come up during the transcription of the text. In addition, we have added some notes of explanation for some references in the text that, we hope, will help the reader.
The 1863 book was the first release of Hospital Sketches in book form. In 1869, the Sketches were combined with nearly three hundred pages of eight Camp and Fireside stories written by Miss Alcott.
Detailed Notes
Nurse Sarah Gamp, a character from the novel Martin Chuzzlewit by Charles Dickens, was a stereotype of untrained and incompeteurses of the early Victorian era, before the reforms of Florence Nightingale.
On page 7, changed three page numbers in the Table of Contents: 10 to 9, 64 to 66, and 84 to 86.
On page 12, Change never-come to never come in "If I never-come back, make a bonfire of them."
On page 14, being between Scylla and Charybdis is an idiom deriving from Greek mythology, meaning "having to choose between two evils".
On page 14, the Massachusetts governor in 1862 was John Albion Andrew.