“What Means This Carnage?”: Civil War Soldiers’ Bodies, Recuperative Projects, and the Army Medical Museum

Abstract

This essay is about bodies in war and a bone collection. In 1862 during the American Civil War, the US War Department established the Army Medical Museum with the mandate to collect morbid anatomy from the battlefield. It was a dramatic response to the existential crisis posed by wounded and dead Union soldiers. Its creation engaged two differing mid-19thc. epistemological orientations devoted to the care of the human body: the emerging field of medical science and antebellum mourning rituals. Treating the museum as an object of material culture, I track its visual strategies to grapple with war’s carnage and national dissolution.