Sick from Freedom: African-American Illness and Suffering during the Civil War and Reconstruction by Jim Downs (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Sick from Freedom: African-American Illness and Suffering during the Civil War and Reconstruction by Jim Downs Christopher Cumo Sick from Freedom: African-American Illness and Suffering during the Civil War and Reconstruction. By Jim Downs. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. Pp. 280. Notes, bibliography, index. ISBN 9780199758722, $29.95 cloth.) In Sick from Freedom, Jim Downs aims to demonstrate that the Civil War and its aftermath brought illness and death to the South's African Americans. In one sense the reader intuits the truth of this purpose. Illness and death have always followed in the wake of warfare. In the second century A.D., Emperor Marcus Aurelius's troops brought plague from the Near East to the heart of the empire. In modern times, British and French soldiers and sailors spread a variety of diseases in their colonial wars, notably cholera in Africa and yellow fever in the Caribbean. Downs adds to this narrative by implying that blacks fared worse than whites in the aftermath of the Civil War. Blacks lacked food and sometimes shelter and clothing and so were susceptible to diseases. The scope of this book includes the crises of warfare as well as a critique of mid nineteenth century medicine. One must remember that physicians did not have a germ theory of disease nor did they have the vast majority of the vaccines, antibiotics, anesthesia, and pharmaceuticals that modern Americans take for granted. By the mid-nineteenth century, medicine had not advanced far beyond the ideas of second-century Greek physician Galen. Sick from Freedom is organized into an introduction, six chapters and an epilogue. The introduction is excellent in preparing the reader for the rest of the book. Briefly chapter 1 overviews mortality and outbreaks of diseases among freedmen and women. Chapter 2 finds fault with the federal government for not creating what one might call a jobs' plan for the South and so exposing freed people to diseases because they had neither work nor the ability to pay for necessities. Chapter 3 examines the role of Freedmen's Hospitals in helping blacks obtain clothing, food, and shelter. Chapter 4, among the most important in the book, examines the mortality of a smallpox epidemic of 1862-68 among African Americans. Chapter five treats the demography of disease, seeking to determine who suffered most from diseases. Chapter 6 narrates the devolution of health care from the federal government to states and localities at the end of Reconstruction. The epilogue shifts the focus from African Americans in the South to Native Americans in the West. The author gleans information from archival documents found at the Alexandria Historical Society, Duke University, Harvard University, the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, the Huntington Library, the Library of Congress, the Massachusetts [End Page 426] Historical Society, and several other depositories. Sick from Freedom is part of a large group of other histories that examine diseases in some region of the world. An example is Charlotte Henze's Disease, Health Care and Government in Late Imperial Russia (Routledge, 2011). One might also place Sick from Freedom in the context of other studies about disease among African Americans. As example is Margaret Humphreys's Intensely Human: The Health of the Black Soldier in the American Civil War (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008). Sick from Freedom also fits with accounts of public health. An example is Margaret Humphreys's Malaria: Poverty, Race, and Public Health in the United States (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001). Downs hints at the differential mortality of blacks and whites during the Civil War and its aftermath. His use of both primary and secondary sources allows him to give a full account of the interplay between disease and discord during and after a cataclysm. In the scope of 178 pages the author uses a tight logic in organizing and presenting information. Christopher Cumo Canton, Ohio Copyright © 2013 The Texas State Historical Association