Mercy in Disaster

A window into the emerging role of women, medical care, and the struggle for Black freedom

Mercy in Disaster is about the forgotten nurse in America’s signature, iconic photograph of Civil War wounded: abolitionist Abby Hopper Gibbons.

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.