Hospital Sketches by Louisa May Alcott

I bought this book when I was at Orchard House last year. It's a series of sketches taken from the letters that Louisa May Alcott wrote home during her own experience of working in an Army hospital during the Civil War.

The book is only about 100 pages long and gives a good insight as to what life in that situation was like.

It's interesting for me to read a book meant for contemporaries at a much later date. Some of her references to people or literary characters are no longer familiar, but surely would have been familiar to the public during her lifetime. I find those references less prevalent in most of her more popular, more enduring classics.

I wonder what people will think in a hundred years about some current books that we feel are very well written. Will the references in them stand the test of time?

The book is available to read online. You can find it here.