She wrote about her experience as a Civil War nurse

At the start of the American Civil War in 1861, Alcott worked in Concord sewing Union uniforms. The next year, she enrolled in the army as a nurse. She provided solace to dying soldiers and assisted medical professionals with amputations in a hotel turned hospital in Washington, D.C. She journaled about her experiences and wrote messages to her family during this time. She wrote Hospital Sketches, a dramatized depiction of her trying but rewarding experiences as a battlefield nurse and published it in 1863. It was based on her letters. After the book gained enormous acclaim, it was revised and expanded in 1869.

“I want something to do,” Louisa May Alcott wrote of her desire to contribute to the Union Army’s effort in the Civil War. If women had been allowed to serve as soldiers, Louisa would have surely taken up arms. But as it was, the only direct way women could serve was to volunteer as nurses, and that’s just what she did.

After the crushing defeat of Union forces in Fredericksburg, December 1862, Louisa began her duties as a nurse at the Union Hotel in Georgetown, Washington D.C. It had been hastily turned into a makeshift hospital. As life-threatening as battleground injuries were to life and limb of soldiers, disease in the aftermath was nearly as much a threat. Not only to the soldiers themselves, but to those who cared for them.