Booknotes: Mercy in Disaster

New Arrival:

• Mercy in Disaster: Abby Hopper Gibbons’s Journals and Letters from Four Years of Civil War Nursing edited by Angela G. Schear (UGA Press, 2026).

From the description: Edited by Angela Schear, Mercy in Disaster "is about the forgotten nurse in America’s signature, iconic photograph of Civil War wounded: abolitionist Abby Hopper Gibbons. Hung in museums large and small, pictured in books, and found across the internet, rarely is what the New York Times called “one of the most remarkable women of this century” identified. More practitioner than pundit, an organizer and social reformer for nearly six decades before the war, Gibbons spent the majority of America’s largest crisis at the front or in various hospitals."

The widely distributed photographic image referenced above, which is reproduced as part of the book's cover art, is this one from James Gardner. The LOC summary describes it as showing "Union soldiers wounded during the Wilderness Campaign outside a hospital established by the Sanitary Commission in Fredericksburg, Virginia." A sitting Gibbons is seen at center and slightly behind the wounded figure standing on crutches.

More from the description: Mercy in Disaster "is the compilation of Gibbons’s wartime letters and journals, which are a vivid window on the emerging role of women, medical care, the struggle for freedom by African Americans, and Gibbons’s fascinating place in it all."

Supporting text includes a lengthy introduction from John Hennessy. Editor Schear divides the Gibbons material into eleven chapters encompassing letters dated November 1861 through May 1865, each chapter introduction providing context and bridging narrative. Footnotes offer additional commentary and identify/clarify persons and places mentioned in Gibbons's writing. Letters to Gibbons from friends are collected in an appendix.