Footnotes: Amputation and Reconstruction in Reed Bontecou's Civil War Photography

Abstract

Footnotes:Amputation and Reconstruction in Reed Bontecou's Civil War Photography Elizabeth Young This essay interprets a disturbing Civil War photograph—at once graphic and unreadable—called A Morning's Work, which was made by Union surgeon Reed Bontecou in 1865 and which depicts the amputated feet of soldiers (Fig. 1). In what follows, I identify several literary and visual frameworks for the photograph, aiming less to cement one interpretation than to accrete some ways of seeing it. I first situate A Morning's Work in relation to Civil War medical, battlefield, and portrait photography, showing how exceptional this image is; the amputated feet of the photograph, I suggest, seem closer to the objects of still life painting than to bodies in Civil War visual culture. I then conjoin the photograph with other northern depictions of the aftermath of amputation, including writing by Oliver Wendell Holmes and S. Weir Mitchell. A Morning's Work also contrasts with these narratives of rehabilitation, whether of individual bodies fitted with prosthetic limbs or the nation reunified in Reconstruction; Bontecou's photograph, I argue, is closer to contemporary accounts of amputated limbs neurologically lingering behind. I close by highlighting covert absences in this photograph. Overtly dismembering soldiers' feet, A Morning's Work also seems to amputate female and Black bodies from a wartime body politic. My method in crafting these speculations is to intermix literary, visual, and cultural histories; scholarship from disability studies also informs this approach. Analyzing Bontecou's feet, I emphasize their figurative possibilities, reflecting on what these feet may symbolize metaphorically and what they may be adjacent to metonymically. I also employ, in my own prose, idioms that reference feet—from footnotes to legwork—not to trivialize this material but rather to underscore the cultural importance ascribed to feet. The distinction between having and losing feet is itself at issue here, as marked in the concept of the "phantom limb," first articulated by Mitchell to describe an aftereffect of Civil War amputation. In both radical and conservative ways, I argue, [End Page 487] Click for larger view View full resolution Fig 1. Reed Brockway Bontecou, A Morning's Work, 1865 (Stanley B. Burns, M.D. & The Burns Archive) [End Page 488] the feet of Bontecou's A Morning's Work function as phantom limbs, which may be photographically and materially dismembered but nonetheless remain underfoot. ________ Dr. Reed Brockway Bontecou (1824-1907) was a surgeon from upstate New York who served with Union Army regiments and hospitals before becoming chief surgeon at the Harewood US Army General Hospital in Washington, D.C. in 1863. In 1862, the Surgeon General had ordered that medical photographs be taken for teaching and research purposes. Bontecou was the most prolific contributor to the resulting archive, making more than five hundred photographs of wounded soldiers. He collected them in four volumes and sent them to the new Army Medical Museum; some were published in the multivolume Medical and Surgical History of the War of the Rebellion (1870-88), and a few were displayed at the 1876 Centennial Exposition of Philadelphia. Postwar, Bontecou's photographs served in an additional role: they were submitted as evidence in soldiers' pension claims, some adjudicated by Bontecou himself.1 Bontecou's images are landmarks in the history of photography, probably the earliest instance of photographs made for medical purposes. They also exemplify changing medical practices during the Civil War, which prompted advances in medical diagnosis, technique, technology, and education (Devine). In recent years, these photographs have received critical attention from scholars including Christopher Benfey, J. T. H. Connor and Michael Rhode, Kathy Newman, Franny Nudelman, Jeff L. Rosenheim, and Shirley Samuels. They have been published by the collector Dr. Stanley Burns and incorporated in art by photographers John Huddleston and Joel-Peter Witkin.2 The ongoing afterlife of these [End Page 489] photographs attests to their intensity and power as well as their pioneering status as medical photographs. Bontecou's photographs customarily feature a living male soldier with his injury clearly visible; Bontecou also wrote brief medical histories of each injury, sometimes attached to the verso of the image, and included identifying labels within some photographs. His photographs...