Overview

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. 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. An educated Quaker, Gibbons chronicles her efforts to overcome, avoid, or accommodate the obstacles confronting the women of her time. She responded to the suffering of war, witnessed medical care in evolution, and everywhere abetted the end of chattel slavery through aid and advocacy.

Full Product Details

9780820375342

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Reviews

In her compelling and insightful book, Angela G. Schear uses the letters and journals of an extraordinary Civil War nurse, Abby Hopper Gibbons, to explore the politics of antislavery, the role of women in wartime medicine, and the process by which Americans coped with death during the nation's deadliest war. -- Wendy Venet * author of A Changing Wind: Commerce and Conflict in Civil War Atlanta *

In her compelling and insightful book, Angela G. Schear uses the letters and journals of an extraordinary Civil War nurse, Abby Hopper Gibbons, to explore the politics of antislavery, the role of women in wartime medicine, and the process by which Americans coped with death during the nation's deadliest war. -- Wendy Venet * author of A Changing Wind: Commerce and Conflict in Civil War Atlanta * A woman of privilege, diligence, and enormous pluck, New York Quaker and humanitarian Abby Hopper Gibbons waged a war of moral outrage as she cared for sufferers in Civil War military hospitals and encampments. Her journals and letters present a who's who of nineteenth-century American abolition reform and women's rights activism. Students of the medical war and the 1863 New York draft riots will find her no-holds-barred candor unusual and refreshing. -- Jane E. Schultz * professor emerita of English, history, and medical humanities, Indiana University-Indianapolis *

Author Information

ANGELA G. SCHEAR is the first descendant of Abby Gibbons to become a nurse. She was a pediatric ICU nurse for seven years and currently serves as an emergency department nurse. She enjoys following her ancestor’s footsteps in disaster relief, deploying multiple times beginning with a stint in Haiti in 2010, followed by stints in Israel, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Armenia, three COVID field hospitals with Samaritan’s Purse, and Ukraine in April 2022. Schear is a guest speaker for her local historical society and lives in Kansas City, Missouri.

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