"This Ghastly War"
The Diary and Letters of a Woman Doctor in the American Ambulance Hospital in France, 1914-1915
Mary M. Crawford, edited by Mary E. Osbourne, McFarland, 2023, 265 pages
Book Review published on: July 25, 2025
"This Ghastly War": The Diary and Letters of a Woman Doctor in the American Ambulance Hospital in France, 1914-1915 is a memoir from Dr. Mary E. Crawford's diary entries and letters while volunteering in the American Ambulance Hospital in France during World War I with edits from Mary E. Osborne. This book gives the reader an insight into the human cost of World War I and the spirit of American volunteerism. It also shows the professional hurdles a woman doctor faced in the early twentieth century medical community.
Editor Mary Osbourne compiled letters and diary entries from Crawford's eleven months of service from 1914 to 1915, focusing on the medical, professional, and personal events related directly to the war and her relations. Osbourne also connects Crawford's personal writings with the events of the war by describing the major events of the war that affected the patients in the beginning of each chapter.
Crawford's letters and diary entries, combined with the editor's discussion, provide readers with a good understanding of the author's perspective as events occurred. Crawford's writings are an authoritative primary source of American feelings about the war. As an American woman doctor volunteering in France before the United States entered the war, the tensions of the time can be seen throughout her diary entries and her letters to her family. Crawford's concerned letters to her future husband about his possible conflicts because of his German heritage and her passionate political discussions with her father about American neutrality are an unvarnished account of the complexities of individual ethics surrounding the great conflict of their time. Her candid comments about not being promoted also allow us to see the professional hurdles she went through. Despite becoming the longest serving junior doctor on the staff and repeated praise from the head doctors, she was told bluntly that she would never be put over a man.
Osborne chose letters and diary entries that she considered pertinent to the topic of the book, so many entries during the year of service were not included in the book. While this is a useful editing decision, her decision to also edit comments that Crawford wrote about some of her patients is unfortunate. Despite battling personal prejudices as a woman and overcoming obstacles in her own life, Crawford still held other prejudices common in her day that were originally present in her letters and diary entries.
Although the editor claims the deletions do not affect the overall tone of the letters, editing these portions from entries selected for the book took away an opportunity for readers to think about the complexity of human nature. Keeping these statements would have allowed readers to ponder how someone who was going through her own fights for equality and volunteering her services for soldiers across France could still hold the views she did.
This book is a worthwhile read for the security community and provides stark imagery of what happens to soldiers in the aftermath of combat. Especially with the increased focus on large scale combat operations, the constant flow of soldiers moving through Crawford's care gives security professionals a chance to reflect on what happens to soldiers after leaving the battlefield. The stress and loss of life continues for soldiers, and this story shows the strain medical professionals and soldiers go through as they try to save lives and rehabilitate casualties. Keeping track of the number of surgeries documented in Crawford's journal quickly becomes a nearly impossible task and the almost daily number of surgeries Crawford documents gives readers pause for how many soldiers flow through this single hospital. Overall, the book gives a human dimension to the nearly ten million casualties of World War I.
Book Review written by: Maj. Taylor Herrington, U.S. Army, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas