The Over 50, Non-Intellectual, Read Fun Books Group Meetup

"My Name is Mary Sutter"

Robin Olivera

What a fascinating and powerful story this was. A midwife that wants to be a surgeon during the time in history that women were still not allowed into medical school (if you could even call them that), the Civil War is breaking out and her fraternal twin sister has just snagged the man that Mary is interested in. Mary is determined though, that she will become a doctor. She finds her way into medical work in every way she can including working at a horribly filthy and dilapidated hospital in Washington as the wounded soldiers are brought in.

Eventually she walks up to the White House to Abraham Lincoln's aid and ask for resources to help the soldiers in the field, where she convinces a surgeon to teach her to do surgery by doing leg amputations one after another. Although careful and skilled, she and the other doctors are distressed to see their patients who seem to be on the mend, succumb to fever and infection. It is only in the few years following the war that the germ theory was learned of and that if they had only washed their hands between patients and cleaned their instruments, many of the Civil War soldiers could have been saved from death.

A book that so easily could have broken down into a trite love story gone wrong, or a skimming the surface of her desire to be a doctor and the two doctors that loved her. The author instead puts us in the mud and vermin infested hospitals and you begin to experience and learn about the Civil War in ways that I had never before known. Of troops sent out with no training, no supplies and no food. No knowledge of true sanitary practices. Of a country that has tilted on its axis as states fight each other and at times brother against brother. Robin Oliveira deals with it all and makes this a novel that will haunt you and make you realize in many ways the futility of war and the discrimination that women had to go through to do the things that they are so capable of--such as being doctors. Of women being given permission to be themselves.