My Name is Mary Sutter
Jun 30, 2010
My Name is Mary Sutter
Author: Robin Oliveira
Hardcover: 384 pages
Publisher: Viking Adult; 1 edition (May 13, 2010)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0670021679
ISBN-13: 978-0670021673
Mary wants one thing in life – to become a surgeon. To heal people. Sounds like a wonderful goal to head toward right? Would it sound like an unattainable goal to you? Not if you study hard and apply yourself is what most people would say.
Unless….
You’re a single young female during the Civil War. Then you’re not even allowed to go to medical school, be among wounded men, or generally do anything more than deliver babies.
Mary is a young women with great ambition. She comes from a long line of midwives and she wants nothing more than to understand the human body better to help humanity. But no one will let her. No college will accept her, no doctor will work with her. When the war comes and they call for nurses in the field, they will not accept Mary because she’s under 30, unmarried and not “plain”.
So Mary does what any sensible young woman does, she take a boat and a train to Washington and wanders around to all the hospitals until one broken down wreck of a facility takes her on as a “charwomen/nurse”. She feels this will be her stepping stone to becoming a surgeon. Meanwhile, her family feels she has abandoned them in their time of need and are hard pressed to forgive.
As the story unfolds we come to know the characters surrounding her, the people who help or hinder her. All fully fleshed out characters, very well written. Mary strives to reach her goal through adversity, hunger, dirty conditions, disease and ignorance. This book does not glamorize the civil war in any way, but instead shows the behind the scenes view from the doctors and nurses who were left to deal with festering wounds on dirty floors, rampant illness without medicine and food and the general lack of knowledge of how to help the injured.
Does Mary ever reach her goal of becoming a surgeon, or at least a doctor?
Read and find out!
