Pamela D. Toler, Heroines of Mercy Street: The Real Nurses of the Civil War

In Heroines of Mercy Street, Pamela Toler highlights the contributions of the nurses at Mansion House who helped manage a wartime hospital during the Civil War. 

Heroines of Mercy Street tells the true stories of the nurses at Mansion House, the Alexandria, Virginia, a mansion turned war-time hospital and setting for the PBS drama Mercy Street. Among the Union soldiers, doctors, wounded men from both sides, freed slaves, politicians, speculators, and spies who passed through the hospital in the crossroads of the Civil War, were nurses who gave their time freely and willingly to save lives and aid the wounded. 

These women saw casualties on a scale Americans had never seen before, and medicine was at a turning point. Heroines of Mercy Street follows the lives of women like Dorothea Dix, Mary Phinney, Anne Reading, and more before, during, and after their epic struggle in Alexandria and reveals their personal contributions to this astounding period in the advancement of medicine.

PAMELA D. TOLER, PhD is the author of The Everything Guide to Socialism, Mankind: The Story of All of Us and most recently, Heroines of Mercy Street: The Real Nurses of the Civil War.

Toler grew up in Springfield, Missouri, where she participated in living history programs at Wilson's Creek National Battlefield, learned to shoot a muzzle-loading rifle and read and re-read the biographies of women like Clara Barton, Julia Ward Howe, and Harriet Beecher Stowe. Her life as a history buff took an abrupt turn when she fell in love with Rudyard Kipling's Kim. It was the first step on the path to a PhD in South Asia history and a lifelong fascination with empires. Studying British India led her inevitably to Islamic India and over the Himalayas into the larger Islamic world. 

These days she focuses on historical figures that step outside the constraints of their time as well as the times and places where two cultures meet and change each other. With Heroines of Mercy Street, Toler has returned to her first historical love: the Civil War in general and its impact on women in particular.