A Soldier's Secret Character Analysis

The bloodiest battle in American history, the Civil War which took place in 1860 through 1864, had many events, battles and hardships. The novel A Soldier 's Secret written by Marissa Moss, contains lots of historical accuracy but also holds a number of inaccuracies as well, in regards to women soldier’s, amputations and the main character Sarah Edmonds.

In A Soldier’s Secret the main character is a 19 year old girls from michigan named Sarah Edmonds. She did not like being a girl since the norm of the time period for women was to stay home and clean all day. So she ran away from home and changed her appearance to look like a guy. She also changed her name to Frank Thompson to go with the whole thing. A year later she decided to enlist into

You might think that doctors did it just to be ruthless but according to Dr. Jonathan Letterman(1863) “The surgery of these battle-fields has been pronounced butchery. Gross misrepresentations of the conduct of medical officers have been made to those who had friends or relatives in the army, who might at any moment require the services of a surgeon. But we perform these surgeries for the greater good.” Meaning that they perform amputations to help save lives and they are not just butchering up people 's arms and legs. The operating rooms are quoted to resemble Hell. According to Jenny Goellnitz(1862) “field hospitals are hell on earth. The surgeon would stand over the operating table for hours without a let up. Men screamed in delirium, calling for loved ones, while others laid pale and quiet with an effect of shock.” In order to amputate one 's body part. The surgeon would clean up the wound, then he would knock out the patient with anesthesia and cut the body part off clean through everything. They did this so it would be easier to finish the procedure(Jenny Goellnitz,2013). In A Soldier 's Secret Amputations were not very historically accurate. Amputations were very over dramatized and way over the top. Their was patient after patient waiting to get limbs chopped up. Blood everywhere and they didn’t even knock anyone out so everyone was screaming, yelling. And holding each other down. The book just made it all a huge mess and terrible place to be. The book 's point of view on amputations is just not historically correct to what actually happened in the Civil War (Marissa