My Name is Mary Sutter (Mary Sutter #1)

by Robin Oliveira

Crossing the cobbled street, Dorothea Dix

“It is an honor to meet you. I’ve heard extraordinary things about your work with prison reform and the insane.”

It was the unwritten rule of assembling armies that a third of their population would be lost to disease within the first month.

After another half hour, Dorothea Dix was in possession of three things: Mr. Lincoln’s blessing, a written order to see Secretary of War Cameron, whose responsibility it would be to appoint her Female Superintendent of Army Nurses, and the troubling sense that despite her intentions, she had generated more worries for the president than she had allayed. As she said good-bye, she finally settled on the reason for her concern. She pitied him. Not because he had taken on a thankless job. That impetus she was entirely familiar with. No, she pitied him because he seemed to possess an endless capacity for grief.

in Washington City. Miss Dorothea Dix Female Superintendent of Army Nurses

January of 1862, when Jenny was due, would be the busiest month for midwives in ten years. Farewell babies, they would be called.

Three months later, in April, there would be another round of newborns nine months after Lincoln called for yet another hundred thousand men.

“People want to believe that we can do anything,” Stipp said. “That doctors can erase pain, erase inevitability.” We doctors, though she wasn’t one yet and might never be. “But it isn’t true.”

Without the war, there would be no research. Without the war, there would be no opportunity for learning.

“Someone has to wring the good from all of this,”

There was another woman there, too. Clara Barton. She brought supplies. Jams and jellies. She was feeding everyone. She was of far more use than I.”

what Lee and Jefferson Davis didn’t understand was that to destroy a union founded on freedom was to declare all of humanity’s endeavors foolhardy.

To fail at this would be to fail at God’s work.

God’s work, then, and whether God existed or not, he would act as if He did, on faith, for he could deduce no other reason in the end for man’s existence.

Their slaves’ skin might be black, but it was not as black as the souls who might enslave them.

She did not need James’s microscope anymore to understand that life existed or did not exist based, at least in part, on the goodwill of man. Really, in the end, everything had turned out to be as simple as that.

William Stipp put his hand to Mary’s cheek. War had nearly driven him insane; loving Mary had been his only refuge.

“You need me,” Mary whispered. But Stipp knew Mary’s declaration was as much a confession as it was a statement. She could as easily have said, I need you.