Louisa May Alcott, a survivor of the Civil War, was born on November 29, 1832 in Germantown, Pennsylvania. Her parents were Amos Bronson Alcott, Bronson for short, and Abigail May Alcott. She was raised with three sisters: Anna, Elizabeth, and Abigail Alcott. She is famous for her thirty plus novels she wrote. Her most known book is Little Women, about four young sisters, is now a major motion-picture event. Hospital Sketchers, a book full of the letters she wrote when she was a nurse in the Civil War in Washintgton D. C., is still timeless ever since it was published in 1863.
          When Louisa was just around the corner of being thirty years old, she decided she wanted to something adventurous and brave to happen in her life. To be a nurse in the war, you had to be under thirty, but after the Battle of the Bull Run in 1862, the hospitals were so desperate for nurses that they accepted Louisa's petition to help. “I love nursing and must let out my pent-up energy in some new way.” At first, she was just doing minor things, such as bandaging cuts and cooling foreheads with rags. But soon enough, she was assisting surgeons as they amputated legs, hands, etc., witnessing very gory, vivid wounds. 
          In her book, Hospital Sketches, based on her experiences in the hospital during the Civil War, Louisa May Alcott expresses how after working in the hospital over the months, her view of war had changed. She believed that the actual effect of war was not taking place on the battlefield, but rather in the rooms of the wounded people. That is where the essence of war happened. For many months, Louisa was suffering from nervous prostration, and on May 6, 1888, she died. If was a very big time of remorse for the Alcott family, because her father had just passed within weeks before her death.