The story in Elissa's Legacy came about from an encounter with a side of US Civil War history that had been introduced to me by my daughter a doctoral occupational therapist formerly with the VA hospital in California - : an awareness of the reality of women serving as men in the Civil War. Research discovered that the role of women on the home front as nurses grew from small roots (home front volunteers) to the formal introduction of the Dorothea Dix Corps of Nurses which morphed from predominantly in-hospital service into ad hoc assistance closer to the field of battle within military field hospitals both North and South. The success of these growing pains was the eventual system of military medical services that exist today.