On the Field of Mercy Book

Women have been practicing the healing arts for centuries. And at the same time, they have wanted to play a vital role in wartime—not only on the home front but also on the battlefield with all its risks and horrors. When war beckoned, they longed to become volunteers, not just to utilize their skills, but because they could go forward to the heart of the action, something that was denied them in peacetime. At war's end they returned home and resumed their lives as ordinary women—never sharing their tales of the extraordinary risks they had taken for what they believed in.

In On the Field of Mercy, Mercedes Graf unearths the remarkable stories of the hidden women who worked as pioneer doctors on the Civil War battlefields, in typhoid-ridden camps in the Spanish-American War, and on the home front and overseas in World War I. She tells of the forgotten nurses and nuns who gave comfort to the sick and dying in the Spanish-American War, and of a woman sculptor who helped restore the confidence of mutilated soldiers in World War I. In doing so, she paints captivating portraits of the heroic women who were willing to confront barriers at times when the military and the public were resistant to the idea of women on the battlefield.