117. MY NAME is MARY SUTTER

Robin Oliveira 2010

Against the backdrop of the Civil War, this powerful historical fiction effectively focuses on a young woman's innermost desire to heal against all hardships. This woman is Mary Sutter, a midwife who dreams of becoming a surgeon, an almost impossible feat for a woman at that time. Having been denied acceptance to medical school, mentorship by their town's surgeon James Blevens, and love of Thomas who later marries her twin sister Jenny, she decides to leave for Washington DC to help care for injured soldiers. She meets surgeon William Stipp, who hesitantly becomes the mentor she seeks. With heavy hearts, very limited resources, lacking in medical and surgical experiences and surrounded by stench, filth, devastation, sickness and death, they tackle an almost insurmountable and overwhelming task. A worthwhile debut novel.

'"Are you Mary Sutter?" Hours had passed since James Blevens had called for the midwife. All manner of shouts and tumult drifted in from the street, and so he had answered the door to his surgery rooms with some caution, but the young woman before him made an arresting sight: taller and wider than was generally considered handsome, with an unflattering hat pinned to an unruly curls, though an enticing brightness about the eyes compensated.'(opening lines)

"You have already seen me turn a child. I am just as skilled with a previa, or twins. But I want more. I want to study. I want to know more about anatomy, physiology. The something I cannot see."(7)

'At times it seems to Mary that the world over was rent with the cries of women giving birth. But when at last the baby emerged, slippery, fighting, squalling, the woman's thighs trembling and then collapsing, and Mary was given charge to kneel beside the mother and wipe-- gently-- the writhing baby dry on her stomach, the battle of labor proved a war worth fighting. What did Mary remember most? Not the mother's bulging flesh, the bullet-shaped head of the infant, the gasp of love when at last the mother encircled the infant in her arms, but Amelia's stillness. Her grand remove. Competence incarnate.'(24)

'No one has ever told her that grief was a leveling of all emotion, that life would stretch before you, colorless and endless, devoid of any hope.'(31)

'She believed her father had loved her best, not knowing it was the clever parent's trick to convince every child they were the most beloved.'(44)

"In all the world, there is not medicine enough to heal what ails the Union army, mopping or no."(129)

'It was his first but not his last amputation. One by one, he would grow adept with a knife, skilled, quick, efficient, in conditions much worse than these. In time, he would wield that blade as an extension of himself, grow to love its heft, its curves, the way the blade caressed and then sliced a portion of a man away. And he would grow to love himself: how he would know just what to do and how to do it, could do it, would be forced to do it for days on end, his knees buckling with fatigue, his heart numb to all but necessity.'(151)

'In the womb, she and Jenny had shared everything, their arms and legs entwined in a seeming eternal embrace, a grasp she feared now had spawned more competition than cooperation. But what was fair when selfishness collided with heartbreak? Mary buried her head in her hands. What was required of a sister?'(223)

'For a moment, Mary could not act. Time, her enemy all day, now betrayed her again by slowing further. A maddening sluggishness seized her. She could not move, could not think fast enough to understand what she was seeing.'(242)

'For all the things we say to our children for their own good, very little good ever comes of it.'(249)

'Come home. I need you. Mary looked up. If only, if only. Time the terrible trick. Find your way through the black shadow of the past.'(285)

"Listen to me Mary. You see all those men? Most of them will die. If not here, then back in Washington. On the Peninsula, no one shot in the belly or chest or head survived, not one, no matter how fast we got to them. Do you understand? We have to save the most men. If we let one on the train who will die anyway, it will doom two."(299)

'You want to be a surgeon? To be a surgeon is to look a man in the eye and tell him the truth. If you can't do that, then get out of here. Go home." He was shouting now, his fury echoing the thunder rising in the distance. Stipp had taken her by the scaffolding of her shoulders as if he no longer trusted her, but now he pulled her into an embrace and whispered, "It is all butchery. Every bit of it. You cannot help them with just whiskey, Mary."(300)

'Lincoln simply could not understand a man who could not see his own fallibility. Irony lost in the blind pursuit of cacophonous righteousness. I wish to be free, but you may not be free. What he hated most was that they could not see the inherent cruelty in their economy. Their slaves' skin might be black, but it was not as black as the souls who might enslave them.'(315)

'By the thousands, the wounded lay on the ground and thought, This thirst is not thirst. This pain is not pain. This world is not being rent in two... That howling is only a whisper. That screech is just a murmur. That explosion is nothing but a sigh. That musket fire is but a rustle... I am not here. We are not here. Armies are not here. The country is not depending on this moment... Battles are conversations. An exchange. A dialogue... None of this is true.'(332)

'It was strange that redemption, when it finally came, felt like a discipline. Mary's movements were certain, her thinking methodical, stemming no longer from fear or love-- the same emotion, when love is unrequited-- but instead from determination. She was not even bartering with death anymore. She was defying it.'(343)

Viking Penguin, First Edition

364 pages

Book borrowed from the Library

I read the book because of Jennifer's review @ Crazy-for-books.com. Her review is here.