Shauna Devine. Learning from the Wounded: The Civil War and the Rise of American Medical Science.

Abstract

The nineteenth-century United States has long been portrayed as a medical dark age, an era of unchecked epidemic disease, rancorous sectarian competition, and crude heroic therapies that harmed more than helped. While this portrayal has its merit—United States physicians certainly lagged behind their European counterparts in the medical sciences—it can mislead if taken too far, rendering too stark a juxtaposition between mid-nineteenth-century medicine and the biomedical revolution, born from the laboratory sciences and the germ theory of disease, which followed. One begins to wonder how the medical sciences could possibly take root in such an intellectually impoverished environment. But history rarely offers such abrupt transitions, decisive breaks, or instant revolutions; rather intellectual shifts are built on a previously laid groundwork. In Learning from the Wounded: The Civil War and the Rise of American Medical Science, Shauna Devine examines the role of the Civil War in laying the foundation for a radical reorientation in medical thought. In this corrective history, she challenges not only the narrative of the medical dark ages, but also the prevailing view of the Civil War as a medical disaster, characterized by brutal amputations and gangrenous stumps.