KDL Recommends > Staff Picks > January 2011
KDL Recommends
My Name Is Mary Sutter: A Novel
ISBN: 9780670021673
Title: My Name Is Mary Sutter: A Novel
Author: Robin Oliveira
KDL Description:
Traveling to Civil War-era Washington, D.C. to tend wounded soldiers and pursue her dream of becoming a surgeon, headstrong midwife Mary receives guidance from two smitten doctors and resists her mother’s pleas for her to return home.
Amazon Description:
The following is by no means an exhaustive accounting of the myriad books that helped me to understand not only the Civil War and its effect on its participants, but also the 19th century and its transportation systems, cities, and values. If I were to inventory my bibliography it its entirety, the list would go on for pages and pages. Numerous rare books, diaries, surgeons’ manuals and government documents aided my research, including, for example, Hermann Haupt’s excellent memoirs and the surgery manual mentioned in My Name Is Mary Sutter. To compose this suggested reading list, I sampled my bookshelf. Some of these are reference books, some memoir, some great narratives of history. The books are readily available, with the exception of The Medical and Surgical History of the War of the Rebellion, which, however, is obtainable either through inter-library loan or in many libraries’ rare books collections. And finally, I would consider myself remiss if I did not include one very special work of fiction that influenced me tremendously as a writer, which I have listed first.
—Robin Oliveira
1) The Transit of Venus by Shirley Hazzard
2) The Medical and Surgical History of the War of the Rebellion, all six volumes (Now available as The Medical and Surgical History of the Civil War, but I used the original volumes to do my research)
3) Too Afraid to Cry: Maryland Civilians in the Antietam Campaign by Kathleen A. Ernst
4) Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 (The History of New York City) by Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace
5) An Albany Girlhood by Huybertie Pruyn Hamlin
6) Our Army Nurses by Mary Gardner Holland
7) Revelle in Washington, 1860-1865 by Margaret Leech
8) The Civil War Day By Day: An Almanac, 1861-1865 by E. B. Long and Barbara Long
9) Mr. Lincoln’s City: An Illustrated Guide to the Civil War Sites of Washington by Richard M. Lee
10) Doctors in Blue: The Medical History of the Union Army in the Civil War by George Worthington Adams
(Photo of Robin Oliveira © Fred Milkie, Jr.)