Compassion under Fire: Heroes of Healing in the Civil War gathers ten vivid accounts of caregiving amid the United States' most devastating nineteenth-century conflict. Spanning memoir, reminiscence, reportage, medical observation, and wartime narrative, the collection charts the improvised hospitals, battlefield relief networks, domestic labors, and moral crises that sustained soldiers and civilians alike. Its standout scenes of nursing under bombardment, confronting disease, and organizing scarce supplies reveal healing as both practical work and ethical resistance to war's dehumanization. The contributors represent a striking cross-section of Civil War witnesses: nurses, relief workers, military chaplains, observers, and writers whose experiences emerged from Union institutions, Confederate communities, and the broader culture of reform and humanitarian service. Their diverse social positions and regional allegiances illuminate how gender, faith, class, race, and military discipline shaped the meaning of care. Together, these voices belong to the rich tradition of Civil War testimony that transformed private recollection into public history and expanded understandings of women's and civilians' wartime agency. This volume is especially rewarding for readers of Civil War history, medical humanities, and nineteenth-century literature. It offers an uncommon opportunity to compare perspectives and prose styles within one carefully framed archive, while tracing the dialogue between suffering, service, and survival. Readers will find both substantial historical instruction and a moving meditation on compassion under extreme conditions.