Invisible Wounds: Mental Illness and Civil War Soldiers by Dillon J. Carroll

Abstract

Reviewed by: Invisible Wounds: Mental Illness and Civil War Soldiers by Dillon J. Carroll David Silkenat Invisible Wounds: Mental Illness and Civil War Soldiers. By Dillon J. Carroll. Conflicting Worlds: New Dimensions of the American Civil War. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2021. Pp. xiv, 324. $45.00, ISBN 978-0-8071-6966-7.) In recent years, historians have paid increasing attention to Civil War soldiers’ mental health. Diane Miller Sommerville, Brian Matthew Jordan, Jeffrey W. McClurken, James Marten, Sarah Handley-Cousins, and others have demonstrated that wartime trauma had lasting effects on veterans, many of whom struggled for decades. Dillon J. Carroll’s Invisible Wounds: Mental Illness and Civil War Soldiers impressively builds on and adds to this scholarship. Carroll chronicles how wartime experiences undermined Union and Confederate soldiers’ mental health, as the horrors of combat combined with poor food, disease, exhaustion, and homesickness. Drawing on the work of Kathryn Shively, Carroll argues that Civil War soldiers practiced self-care individually and in community with fellow soldiers to cope with the trauma of war. Some soldiers ended up hospitalized for mental illness: over 1,500 Union [End Page 154] soldiers were sent to the Government Hospital for the Insane (later rebranded as St. Elizabeth’s Hospital) in Washington, D.C., while an unknown number of Confederate soldiers were sent to state institutions. In the decades that followed, veterans carried their trauma with them. Overcrowded asylums struggled to cope with increasing numbers of former soldiers, while many traumatized veterans received care from family. Carroll persuasively argues that many Civil War veterans suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder. While he is not the first historian to make this claim—see Eric T. Dean Jr.’s Shook over Hell: Post-Traumatic Stress, Vietnam, and the Civil War (Cambridge, Mass., 1997)—Carroll skillfully draws on modern psychology and medicine to demonstrate how traumatic wartime experiences prompted postwar symptoms, including nightmares, headaches, and suicidal behavior. Although Carroll is careful not to posthumously diagnose individuals, he argues that the patterns of behaviors that veterans demonstrated, and that doctors and families witnessed, point in that direction. Carroll also argues that other war-related phenomena, including alcoholism, opium addiction, and syphilis, contributed to the postwar veteran mental health crisis. Invisible Wounds has much to recommend it. It artfully uses asylum records, soldiers’ letters, and diaries to examine mental illness from the perspectives of both doctors and patients. It also is unafraid to engage with modern medicine and put it in conversation with Civil War–era understandings of mental illness. The book’s descriptions of the brutality and trauma of Civil War soldiering are graphic and evocative. Carroll also does an excellent job depicting a handful of veterans and doctors, including Thomas Hyde, Prince Rivers, Pliny Earle, and Silas Weir Mitchell, giving faces to the book’s broader themes. Some readers may not be swayed by a few of the claims made in Invisible Wounds. Carroll observes that relatively few Black veterans ended up in hospitals like St. Elizabeth’s. He argues that African Americans did not experience the negative effects of wartime service because they were “imbued with a sense of purpose and a desire to strike back at the trauma of slavery” and were therefore “less susceptible to combat trauma than white soldiers” (p. 2). This is a provocative claim, and the evidence that Carroll provides to support it is intriguing but ultimately not entirely persuasive. Deeply researched, Invisible Wounds paints a gruesome picture of how the Civil War left a lasting mark on the minds of the men who fought in it. Its brisk, accessible writing style would make it appropriate for undergraduate and graduate classrooms, where it is bound to prompt discussion and debate. David Silkenat University of Edinburgh Copyright © 2023 The Southern Historical Association