Get Russia’s Sisters of Mercy and the Great War: More Than PDF

they're struggle tales, full of risk and deprivation, pleasure and chance, sorrow and trauma, scandal and controversy—and simply because they're the struggle tales of nurses, they continue to be mostly untold. Laurie Stoff's pioneering paintings brings the wartime reports of Russia's "Sisters of Mercy" out of the shadows to teach how those nurses of the nice struggle, faraway from in simple terms binding wounds, supplied important companies that placed them squarely in routinely "masculine" territory, either actually and figuratively.

While Russian nursing shared many positive factors of women's clinical provider in different international locations, it was once in many ways profoundly varied. Like infantrymen and medical professionals, the nurses, in particular these on the frontlines, skilled severe chilly, consistent fatigue, infectious illnesses, lethal artillery fireplace, and aerial bombardment. additionally they assumed public management roles and have been usually in charge of males. The nurses operated in a sphere routinely thought of solely masculine and challenged social conventions surrounding gender and warfare through carrying out actions thought of beside the point for women.

Filled with compelling eyewitness debts of girls who stepped outdoors their assigned roles in Russian society, this ebook supplies us our first transparent view of what wartime provider used to be like for those nurses within the nice conflict. We study firsthand—from memoirs and diaries, modern periodicals and reminiscences—about those women's motivations, the character and specifics in their paintings, the cultural stereotypes and conventions that formed their reports, and their interactions with the lads they cared for and served with. Stoff additionally explores the cultural and social implications of the Sisters' service—in relation to the govt, the army, and the church—both fast and long term. the 1st up-close and in-depth research of Russia's nurses within the nice warfare, Stoff's paintings restores a serious bankruptcy to the historic narrative of the struggle, and to the bigger background of gender and tradition in early twentieth-century Russia.