Military medical history is being saved in a digital archive

UP to the beginning of the nineteenth century the medical history of wars was very incomplete, and is to be found in memoirs or commentaries written by individual military surgeons. To this category belong the works of Percy, M'Grigor, and particularly Barron Larrey, the great military surgeon of the Napoleonic period. A great change, however, took place with the publication by the Americans of the splendid and exhaustive “Medical and Surgical History of the War of Rebellion (1861–1865),” which has remained a model for all later works on military medicine. After the greatest of all wars it was to be expected that the medical histories which were bound to make their appearance would be voluminous and detailed, and that this country would not be behind others in this respect. The volume before us does not lead one to anticipate a standard work of permanent value in medical literature. From the brief preface, occupying a page and a half, it is not clear what the object of the work is. It is stated that the contributors had at their disposal the material contained in official documents, while later on it is said that “there has been little opportunity for further analysis and study of accumulated records of medical cases,” and an apology is made that the contributors have been handicapped by the fact that papers published during the war were comparatively few. To any one conversant with the volume of medical literature which poured out in every country, this must seem an extraordinary statement. The “Index Medicus War Supplement,” dealing with 1914–17, occupies alone 260 pages of titles, which at a conservative estimate represents at least 10,000 papers which were published on some aspect of military medicine during these three years. History of the Great War, based on Official Documents. Medical Services: Diseases of the War. Vol. I. Edited by Major-General Sir W. G. MacPherson Sir W. P. Herringham Col. T. R. Elliott Lt.-Col. A. Balfour. Pp. viii + 550. (London: H.M.S.O., 1922.) 21s. net.

Dwelling in the Digital Archive:A Meditation on the Civil War Governors of Kentucky Project Stephen Berry (bio) I have said elsewhere that if history is my religion, the archive is my church and research is my sacrament (and my penance). I never feel myself so much at home as when I am entombed with my dead in some archival catacombs, convinced I am searching for their humanity, knowing I am searching for my own. To be an archive rat, said Derrida, "is to burn with a passion. It is never to rest, interminably, from searching for the archive, right where it slips away. It is to run after the archive, even if there's too much of it. . . . It is to have a compulsive, repetitive . . . irrepressible desire to return to the origin, a homesickness, a nostalgia for . . . the most archaic place of absolute commencement." As historians, the archive is our psychic headwaters. For narrow professional reasons, we go to answer research questions, but we know the pilgrimage runs deeper. We aren't looking for data. We're looking for Revelation. Like time-tripping flaneurs, we watch the dead live their lives, not as we live ours, and we revel in the differences, inspired by all that we have to live up to, ashamed of all we need to live down. This encounter, Carolyn Steedman tells us, is physical. The dead press their concerns upon us, and we come away with their dust in our lungs. Keats used to say that when he came home from a party he felt a little lost. "Myself [does not go] home [End Page 161] to myself," he marveled, "but the identity of everyone in the room begins so to press upon me, that I am in a very little annihilated." We go to the archive to be multiplied. We go to be annihilated.1 Somehow these metaphysical rites coexist with our rising skepticism of the archive itself. (We love our god, but we doubt it too.) The 'archival turn' is relatively old now I know. Derrida published Archive Fever in 1995. Ann Stoler's "Colonial Archives and the Arts of Governance" came out in 2002, the same year as Steedman's Dust. Summarizing the general line of thought—that archives encode and enshrine Power—Stoler noted: "Scholars need to move from archive-as-source to archive-as-subject. . . . [We need to] view archives not as sites of knowledge retrieval, but of knowledge production . . . [as] cultural agents of 'fact' production [and] state authority." While this thinking may be more than twenty years old, there are reasons to believe that we are in the middle and not the end of that turn. First, as Civil War historians we continue to unspool precisely how insights that were originally framed by debates over colonialism can be best applied in a related but not synonymous context. The Civil War was absolutely a war for empire—a war to determine which imperial model would prevail in the west—but as a war we fought against ourselves there are peculiar archival dynamics to what records got made and saved and put to what purposes. Second, as the country has lurched to the dystopian right, the urge to interrogate inherited structures, especially structures of information, has deepened. Every generation takes on inequality, and each finds it rooted deeper than they originally thought. At least since Gayatri Spivak's "Can the Subaltern Speak?" (1985), there has been a debate over whether the archive really can be read 'against the grain' of the forces that created it. Third, and most important, the digital turn allows us for the first time to create our [End Page 162] own archives. Some we might call archival-boutique—archives of coroners' reports, say, or letters from transitionally literate Civil War soldiers—projects that search for needles in the haystacks of other archives and use them to create a haystack of needles. Other digital archives, like Valley of the Shadow or the Civil War Governors of Kentucky (CWGK), create an archive where what is being privileged is not a record type but a peculiar vantage—a sort of transect or view, a gubernatorial panopticon or the line of...

This paper examines Belgian refugees in Wales during the First World War and local responses to their presence. A case study from a rural, Welsh-speaking area examines how, as the War continued, the refugees became a burden on the dwindling resources of local refugee committees and ultimately had to leave to be re-settled elsewhere. Using digital resources and methods for this study raises issues about fragmentation of sources and the completeness of the archival record, and suggests how digital archives on the Belgian refugee migration may be further developed to enable new insights into local responses to the largest movement of refugees in the early part of the twentieth century.

Multidisciplinarity or Encroachment

For many years now I have been investigating a somewhat obscure facet of our wide-ranging field of medical history. My intent is to report, as it were, on what I have been doing. On 25 December 1941, Hong Kong surrendered to the forces of the Imperial Japanese Army; the survivors became prisoners and remained so until mid-1945. In the past, the many accounts of these events have been presented, historiographically, as political or military history. My thesis is that the Hong Kong story, most particularly that portion that began on Christmas Day and ended only 44 months later - the prisoner-of-war period - should be seen not as political history or as military history, but predominantly as medical history.

#Archives: Centering the Profession in Critical Conversations and Popular Discourse

BOOK REVIEWS25 1 icans as they sought to gain their preferences or to treat them within a sectional focus that is not always applicable. Still, Greenstone has issued an original and powerful challenge to scholars of American thought and practice and provided a compelling framework for further explorations of similar imagination. Joel H. Silbey Cornell University The Shadows Rise: Abraham Lincoln and the Ann Rutledge Legend. By John Evangelist Walsh. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993. Pp. x, 187. $25.95.) Following the lead of scholars John Y. Simon and Douglas Wilson, Mr. Walsh, a former publishing executive who has written a dozen books, argues that the Ann Rutledge legend is not a legend but a historical fact. To ignore it would be to overlook an event that critically shaped Abraham Lincoln's personality, he would say. Mr. Walsh nimbly lays out the evidence, most of it from the oral narratives recorded by Lincoln's law partner William H. Herndon. He has no significant new evidence but believes that the record long available has been slighted by professional historians (before Simon and Wilson). In arguing from the evidence and in speculating on Lincoln's psychological state, Mr. Walsh is somewhat heavy handed. Moreover, he confines his history to the narrowest focus possible and makes no effort to inform his narrative with insights from women's history, social history, folklore, political history, or medical history—all of which might be brought to bear usefully. As an informative enterprise, Jean Baker's Mary Todd Lincoln, which she describes as "biography as social history," offers much more than this singleminded little book. Though a slow reader, I finished the book in an afternoon—a tribute to the author's gifts as a writer. But readers of Civil War History could spend their afternoons more profitably, delving into the more significant parts of Lincoln 's life: his career in the Whig party, his role in the Republican party, and his presidential administration. Mark E. Neely, Jr. St. Louis University Abraham Lincoln the Orator: Penetrating the Lincoln Legend. By Lois J. Einhorn . (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1992. Pp. xx, 225. $45.00.) This beautifully crafted book is the sixteenth volume in a series on Great American Orators. In this study of Lincoln as an orator, Lois J. Einhorn has divided her work into two parts. The first part seeks to analyze the rhetoric of Lincoln. The second part consists of nine selected Lincoln speeches 252CIVIL WAR HISTORY beginning with the "Lyceum Address" ofJanuary 27, 1838, and ending with the "Second Inaugural Address" of March 4, 1865. According to Einhorn, it was Lincoln's rhetorical skills that brought him fame and catapulted him into the White House. To support that thesis, Einhorn quotes Henry Clay Whitney, a lawyer who rode the circuit with Lincoln in Illinois. Whitney claimed that Lincoln's rise to the presidency "was achieved entirely by oratory . He held no office; had no position where he could act; had no publication in which to air his views; no way to reach the public except by speeches" (xvii). From her background in rhetoric, Einhorn shares with her readers what Lincoln thought to be the most important aspects of his public speaking: speaking from conviction, having the listeners' best interests at heart, keeping passion under the control of reason, the careful choice of words, the use of stories and analogies to clarify and persuade, stating ideas clearly and concisely , and diligent preparation. Einhorn observes that "when Lincoln assumed the presidency, his speaking changed in significant and noticeable ways." For one thing, as president, his public speeches were less in number and shorter in length. More importantly , however, Lincoln's style moved from oratorical before his presidency to literary after assuming office. "Perhaps," writes Einhorn, "Lincoln found the best combination: successful speeches early in life that rocketed him to national power and more literary speeches later in life through which he continues to speak" (42). As an example, Einhorn points to the "Gettysburg Address ," which was not considered a great speech at the time of its delivery. "Paradoxically," says Einhorn, "had Lincoln made the type of changes that might have made the 'Gettysburg Address' a great...

This study assessed differences in personal, medical, and health care utilization characteristics of homeless veterans living in metropolitan versus nonmetropolitan environments. Data were obtained from a Veterans Health Administration (VHA) network sample of homeless veterans. Chi-square tests were used to assess differences in demographics, military history, living situation, medical history, employment status, and health care utilization. Moderator analyses determined whether predictors of health care utilization varied by metropolitan status. Of 3,595 respondents, 60% were residing in metropolitan areas. Age, sex, and marital status were similar between metropolitan and nonmetropolitan homeless. Metropolitan homeless were less likely to receive public financial support or to be employed, to have at least one medical problem, one psychiatric problem, or current alcohol dependency, but more likely to be homeless longer. Of the 52% of the sample who used VHA care in the last 6 months, 53% were metropolitan versus 49% nonmetropolitan (p = .01). Metropolitan status predicted at least one VHA visit within the prior 6 months (OR:1.3, CI:1.1, 1.6). Significant differences occur in the personal, medical, and health care utilization characteristics of homeless veterans in metropolitan versus nonmetropolitan areas.

60CIVIL WAR HISTORY treatment. Stoneman himself attributed much of his poor showing on a disastrous raid during the Atlanta campaign to prostration from blood loss. Welsh has produced an impressive volume—exhaustively researched and painstakingly prepared. A glossary of the most frequently encountered conditions and terms from the era's outdated medical nosology is included to assist the modern reader. Also useful is a sequence section that includes the dates of wounds, accidents, and deaths inflicted as well as geographic locations. Like Medical Histories of Confederate Generals, this volume will have a wide appeal to those interested in the Civil War and medical history. James O. Breeden Southern Methodist University Shades ofBlue and Gray:An Introductory Military History ofthe Civil War. By Herman Hattaway. (Columbia: University ofMissouri Press, 1997. Pp. xii, 28 1 . $29.95.) Herman Hattaway's Shades ofBlue and Gray is a concise, intelligent, and enjoyable overview of military affairs in the Civil War. Neither a textbook nor a scholarly monograph, it is essentially an extended essay that reflects the author's interests, experiences, and personality. Hattaway hopes his book will provide a "good grounding in fundamental Civil War military history" for recruits new to the field and a "distillation of my thinking and my ideas" for veterans in need of a refresher (ix). In that, and in much more, he succeeds. While it is not possible to summarize Hattaway's take on every aspect of the Civil War, readers familiar with his earlier work on Northern victory and Southern defeat will find few surprises. The book opens and closes with surveys of pre- and postwar military developments in the nineteenth century, especially the rapid pace of technological change and the slower but equally significant growth of military professionalism. In the course of analyzing most of the major campaigns and battles, Hattaway examines such topics as the emergence of "hard" war, the development of army-sized raids, and the strengths and weaknesses of key commanders. He writes, for example, of Henry Halleck's superb but underappreciated managerial skills and of the "blinding exhilaration" that gripped R. E. Lee after Chancellorsville and affected his performance at Gettysburg. But this reviewer's favorite passage is Hattaway's suggestion that Richard Ewell had "severe mental problems" (143). According to the author, Ewell not only looked like a bird, he thought he was a bird. This assertion should make for a fascinating recasting of the struggle for Culp's Hill. Shades ofBlue and Gray is not without a few flaws. In such a brief book the amount of ink wasted on the faddish but insignificant topic of women soldiers is annoying, especially when so little is included about the war on the water. While Hattaway notes the development of mines and submarines, he has relatively little to say about the wide array of maritime and riverine activities car- BOOK REVIEWS6l ried out by the navies ofboth sides. Hattaway devotes a disproportionate amount of space to events in the eastern theater, an oddly old-fashioned approach that is a particular sore point with this reviewer. On the other hand, the unorthodox annotated bibliography is a welcome feature. Included are novels, picture books, and musical recordings along with the usual dry-as-dust scholarly tomes. (Note to all: future bibliographies of this sort will have to include CD-ROMS, computer games, and internet websites.) Quibbles aside, Shades of Blue and Gray is a thoughtful, informative, and sometimes provocative book that incorporates much recent scholarship and successfully fits the Civil War into the larger context of military developments in the early industrial era. William L. Shea University of Arkansas at Monticello Civil War Generalship: TheArt OfCommand ByWJ. Wood. (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1977. Pp. xii, 269. $59.95. Chroniclers of Civil War battles are not always good military historians, and vice versa. W J. Wood shows himselfadept at both in this insightful study of six Civil War commanders and how they coped with the unprecedented problems they faced. He beams with a discussion of that perennially interesting question of whether the Civil War was a modern war. His answer is that it both was and was not. It was, in his words, "the sandwiched war" (1...

The application of psychiatry to war and terrorism is highly topical and a source of intense media interest. Shell Shock to PTSD explores the central issues involved in maintaining the mental health of the armed forces and treating those who succumb to the intense stress of combat. Drawing on historical records, recent findings and interviews with veterans and psychiatrists, Edgar Jones and Simon Wessely present a comprehensive analysis of the evolution of military psychiatry. The psychological disorders suffered by servicemen and women from 1900 to the present are discussed and related to contemporary medical priorities and health concerns. This book provides a thought-provoking evaluation of the history and practice of military psychiatry, and places its findings in the context of advancing medical knowledge and the developing technology of warfare. It will be of interest to practicing military psychiatrists and those studying psychiatry, military history, war studies or medical history.

This volume brings together essays that consider wounding and/or wound repair from a wide range of sources and disciplines including arms and armaments, military history, medical history, literature, art history, hagiography, and archaeology across medieval and early modern Europe.

Reviewed by: The Last Plague: Spanish Influenza and the Politics of Public Health in Canada by Mark Osborne Humphries Sarah Glassford Humphries, Mark Osborne — The Last Plague: Spanish Influenza and the Politics of Public Health in Canada. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013. Pp. 323. If, like me, you tried to write an undergraduate essay in the early 2000s on “Spanish Flu” in Canada, you probably found few sources, wrote your 10 or 20 pages, and moved on with your life thinking you knew what there was to be known. Mark Osborne Humphries’ The Last Plague: Spanish Influenza and the Politics of Public Health in Canada now joins Esyllt Jones’s Influenza 1918: Disease, Death, and Struggle in Winnipeg (UTP 2007) in showing us how little we actually understood. Humphries’ important and insightful book significantly alters the place of Spanish Flu in the landscape of Canadian social and medical history. Some 50,000 Canadians died in this epidemic, and in The Last Plague Humphries demonstrates that their deaths ultimately brought Canada into a new, modern era of public health work and knowledge. Even if they have never spared a thought for cholera, smallpox, or any other historical epidemic, most students and scholars of modern history are at least familiar with the existence of the global 1918–19 influenza pandemic, hot on the heels of the First World War. Humphries gives the wartime context of the epidemic its due, but his crucial contribution to the historiography is to reframe the story completely, moving it from the footnotes of wartime social and military history to a central position in the long history of Canadian public health. In Humphries’ assessment, the Spanish Flu epidemic served as a vital turning point in the evolution of Canadians’ collective understanding of the proper role of government in fostering a healthy population, as well as the country’s understanding of disease more broadly (from something outsiders brought in, to something Canadians themselves spread). In public health, as in so many other respects, the wartime crisis prompted dramatic re-imaginings of how state and citizens should interact. The book therefore has important things to say to those interested not only in health history, but also in wartime society and state formation. Above all, this is a book about context, and this long view proves not only innovative but also highly instructive. After the introduction, the book begins nearly a century before the Spanish Flu epidemic, outlining in chapters two to four how Canada dealt with various 19th century epidemics, how public health and sanitation reform movements influenced Canada before 1914, and how the country dealt with an influenza epidemic in 1889–91. Chapters five through seven examine the 1918–19 influenza pandemic, assessing the impact of the disease’s first (milder) and second (deadlier) waves, as well as municipal, provincial, and federal government responses. Chapter eight covers the related-but-separate issue of the epidemic’s wartime context. The remaining two chapters and conclusion demonstrate the role of the epidemic in fundamentally changing the course of Canadian public health policy from 1919 onward. Sixty-nine pages of endnotes, a wide-ranging 39-page bibliography, and a 17-page index round out this useful resource for both scholars and students. [End Page 559] The bibliography stands as a testament to Humphries’ exhaustive primary and secondary source research, which encompasses bureaucratic, military, women’s, labour, and Western social history, as well as the history of medicine and health which is its primary focus. Overall, Humphries’ sources serve him well: his detailed tracking of the multiple vectors of influenza in chapters five and six, for example, convincingly overturn the previously-held assumption that the epidemic came to Canada from Europe with returning soldiers. Similarly, in chapter seven he makes excellent use of primary sources and existing provincial and local studies of the epidemic, to tell the on-the-ground story of how Canadians dealt with the deadly flu. The discussion of medical and popular remedies in circulation (pp. 121–22), and the descriptions of poverty and sickness in flu-stricken working-class districts (pp. 124–26) are particularly evocative and moving. However, Humphries’ love affair with his sources occasionally gets...

As a historiographical subject, the history of military surgery has been rather neglected over the years, often regarded as a slightly marginal aspect of both military history and medical history. However, there have been periods when battlefields were the location of a high percentage of serious surgical interventions at times when many people who were qualified as surgeons actually devoted themselves to quiet general practice. Likewise, the exigencies of war have often driven rapid advancements in surgical techniques, prosthetics, and trauma care. A glance at the available literature reveals that much of it has been produced by physicians, active or retired. While these works often offer invaluable information, and some of them excel, they are sometimes stronger on factual narrative than on conceptual analysis, and on occasion have perhaps been a little beset by habits of Whiggish history, setting out a narrative of progress led by famous surgeons. More recently, however, the historiography of military surgery has been strengthened both by professional historians and by dedicated physicians, reflecting broader changes in historical methodology, technology and social perspectives. There has also been more interest in the cultural meanings associated with surgery, picking up themes from the cultural history of medicine and the history of the body. Increasing interest in the history of disability over the past few decades has also contributed to new lines of inquiry, looking at the long-term impact of military surgery. In recent years, scholars with instincts drawn from the social history of medicine tradition have come to influence the subdiscipline in productive ways. Scholars have delved into soldiers’ testimonies, diaries, and letters to understand their lived experiences of injury, treatment, and recovery. By focusing on individual voices, historians have revealed the physical and psychological toll of war on combatants and the challenges they faced in accessing medical care amid the chaos of war. That has led to more focus on patients’ perspectives in line with the broader shift toward a “history from below.” While certain topics, especially in relation to the Napoleonic Wars and the First World War, have been well covered, there remain important areas of the history of military surgery that are not well represented in the scholarship, notably in relation to traditions beyond Europe and North America. This bibliography is by no means comprehensive, but it aims to give an overview of some of the most relevant literature.

This volume brings together essays that consider wounding and/or wound repair from a wide range of sources and disciplines including arms and armaments, military history, medical history, literature, art history, hagiography, and archaeology across medieval and early modern Europe.

Reviewed by: Before My Helpless Sight: Suffering, Dying and Military Medicine on the Western Front, 1914-1918 Ana Carden-Coyne Leo van Bergen . Before My Helpless Sight: Suffering, Dying and Military Medicine on the Western Front, 1914-1918. The History of Medicine in Context. Surrey, UK: Ashgate, 2009. ix + 528 pp. Ill. $69.95 (978-0-7546-5853-5). The focus on suffering and dying in Leo van Bergen's book follows from a trajectory of First World War studies begun by contemporary war poets and visual artists and critically investigated by historians such as Jay Winter, George Mosse, Joanna Bourke, Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau, Annette Becker, Roger Cooter, Deborah Cohen, and Jeffrey Reznick, among many others. Instead of privileging the military medical perspective, Leo van Bergen's Before My Helpless Sight conceptualizes men's bodies and minds in battle through the experiential pathway of fighting, wounding, suffering, and dying. In this way, medical intervention is constituted as relational to the social experience. For scholars of military and medical history and the cultural history of war, there is not a lot new in this book; it treads a well-worn path of understanding, does not uncover new lines of enquiry, and relies largely on secondary sources including popular military history. The author establishes from the outset that the book does not intend to open new archival sources or advance new arguments. Drawing on published sources, the author alerts the reader to the fact that the book is "not the result of weeks or months spent in dark bunkers and damp cellars, leafing through old documents" (p. 1). As a work of synthesis, it surveys many of the major themes of interest in the field. The book is nicely structured into five evocative themes: Battle, Body, Mind, Aid, and Death. There are some important discussions, such as how statistics on casualties were gathered and how they can be easily misinterpreted. Yet the structure of the chapters, while interesting and original, is often haphazard and needed to be explained more. The chapter on "The Body," for instance, is usefully separated into smaller sections that link physical experiences to environmental conditions. Under "Conditions in the Trenches" are vignettes that come under titles such as clothes (e.g., discussing the weight men had to carry), hunger and thirst, rain, mud, and cold, vermin, noise, and stench, and finally the trenches themselves. "Disease" is a further section that considers sickness, wounds, "the chemical horror," and "the lucky wound" (which English-speaking soldiers called the "Blighty wound"—a light wound treated in an English base hospital). The difficulty with this book's attempt "to bring together in a single readable volume all the diffuse knowledge" (p. 1) on this subject is that the primary sources, when drawn from the secondary scholarship, are dislocated from the arguments that scholars have advanced. Their original research is cited without sufficient attention to their arguments or to their different approaches to key questions or evidence and how considerable historical debates have been conducted. This problem can be seen, for instance, in regard to the social, cultural, and medical history of shell shock and mental illness. The absence of a conclusion, supplanted by an afterword, amplifies the absence of argumentation. The book misses the opportunity to overview the various historical debates—readers could have been [End Page 693] offered more in being made aware of how historians both produce and contest the "diffuse knowledge" of the First World War. Although "not an original work" (p. 1), as the author explains, this book nevertheless makes a contribution in the way it draws together well-known English language published sources and those in Dutch, German, and French. Some of this latter scholarship will be unfamiliar to many readers, and therefore it is very useful indeed to have the compare and contrast effect of experiences and imaginings of wartime suffering. Moreover, this book is quite accessible to ordinary readers and will be useful for undergraduates seeking broader understanding of the impact of the First World War beyond the focus on the British experience. Ana Carden-Coyne University of Manchester Copyright © 2010 The Johns Hopkins University Press