My Name is Mary Sutter by Robin Olivera

An excellent book, set at the begining of the Civil War.  Mary Sutter and her mother are both midwives, and well respected in the community.  Mary is often sought out for difficult births, but she longs to be a surgeon, an occupation women do not hold  in the 1860's.  She sets off for Washington, D. C. to volunteer her services at the military hospitals, where she becomes laundress, cook, plumber, nurse, charwoman, but not a surgeon.  She is continually discouraged frpm her ambition by almost all the people she meets.  Finally she is able to secure supplies and goes to the battlefields, where she makes herself indispensible to the surgeons, who teach her how to amputate limbs.  When she is able to show the doctors that she is able to do their work, she ends up going to medical school and achieves her goal.  She never gave up her dream!