During the American Civil War, it was women who formed the vanguard of demanding better sanitary conditions at field hospitals and in the city hospitals. Thousands of women volunteered to work in hospitals and for the Sanitary Commission, the organization that advocated better practices and lobbied for increased supplies. Born in England, Katharine Prescott Wormeley was an American nurse in the Civil War, author, editor, and and one of America's best-known translators of French language literary works. Her letters from the period of the Peninsular Campaign of 1862 provide a warm, witty, and at times heartbreaking view of the hardworking women to whom so much was owed by the soldiers and the nation. Every memoir of the American Civil War provides us with another view of the catastrophe that changed the country forever.