Civil War Hospitals Research Articles

“A Face of Anguish”: Pain and Portraiture in the Civil War Hospital

This essay traces the visual cultures that emerged around Civil War soldiers’ pain and argues that the method of portraiture has much to offer the field of health humanities. It begins by tracing efforts to capture Civil War soldiers’ pain in both popular and clinical media before turning to hospital accounts by Louisa May Alcott and Walt Whitman that adopt the trope of portraiture in order to make soldiers’ suffering legible to a wider audience. This essay argues that these ekphrastic accounts make visible not only soldiers’ suffering but also the act of observing and interpreting it, and the essay concludes by suggesting that by bringing into focus the process of perceiving another’s pain, the study of portraiture offers an important complement to both the field of narrative medicine and health humanities approaches to studying visual art.

Useful Objects: Museums, Science, & Literature in Nineteenth-Century America

Useful Objects: Museums, Science, & Literature in Nineteenth-Century America

Useful Objects: Museums, Science, & Literature in Nineteenth-Century America

Useful Objects: Museums, Science, & Literature in Nineteenth-Century America

Kirsten Twelbeck, "Beyond the Civil War Hospital: The Rhetoric of Healing and Democratization in Northern Reconstruction Writing, 1861-1882" (Bielefeld: transcript, 2018), 438 pp.

Kirsten Twelbeck, "Beyond the Civil War Hospital: The Rhetoric of Healing and Democratization in Northern Reconstruction Writing, 1861-1882" (Bielefeld: transcript, 2018), 438 pp.

Manly Sacraments and Masculine Devotions: Catholic Manhood in the Civil War

Manly Sacraments and Masculine Devotions:Catholic Manhood in the Civil War William S. Cossen55 Religion continues to be a subject of growing interest among historians of the Civil War era. Chandra Manning notes that it is in the midst of "a comeback, after decades of more or less benign neglect."56 The war has often been presented by scholars of U.S. Catholicism as a venue in which Catholics claimed for themselves and for their church a firmer inclusion in the American nation. Catholics' wartime loyalty, whether to the Confederate or Union causes, provided them with convincing proof of their patriotic virtue and functioned as a pointed rejoinder to claims of Catholic outsider status. Whether it was through the dedicated service of the Irish Brigade, Father William Corby's much-heralded, mass absolution of Catholic and non-Catholic soldiers at Gettysburg, or the distinguished record of wartime chaplains, Catholics could rightly point to the Civil War era as one that offered great potential for American Catholicism to claim its place as a leader in the wider national community. While the ethnic and nationalist dimensions of Civil War Catholicism have been the subjects of much research in Catholic studies, the topic of Catholic gender has not.57 To be sure, there has been ample scholarship on the work of women religious as nurses and on the dozens of priests who served as chaplains on battlefields and in camps, but what has been lacking in these studies is an exploration of how the war shaped Catholic soldiers as men.58 Additionally, because [End Page 29] research on the everyday, lived religion of Catholic soldiers has also been lacking in the ever-growing body of scholarship on the history of the war—for example, soldiers' reception of sacraments, their use of sacramentals, their prayer practices, and their conceptions of spiritual matters—we should spend some time considering how these wartime activities formed Catholic soldiers as Catholic men. Catholic newspapers, chaplains' diaries, soldiers' correspondence, and reminiscences of women religious who served as nurses in Civil War hospitals provide glimpses of a world in which Catholic women played formative roles in forming Catholic men's religious lives and in shaping a distinctly Catholic manhood. This is not altogether surprising given the conclusion of scholars that so many devotional practices in American Catholic history were frequently understood, whether explicitly or implicitly, as feminine, and that it is common to follow Ann Braude's lead in starting with the assumption that "women's history is American religious history."59 However, one of the dangers in not further interrogating these ideas is that it becomes easy to conclude that men, many of whom devoted themselves in the Civil War era to the cultivation of what historian Amy S. Greenberg terms "martial manhood," were only peripherally connected to these supposedly feminine practices.60 Assuming an innate femininity for the devotional practices of the past also risks reinforcing nineteenth-century anti-Catholic portrayals of an effeminate Catholicism opposed to a masculine Protestantism.61 As Colleen McDannell has explained, Catholic men were active and enthusiastic participants in nineteenth-century [End Page 30] devotional life, and "we do not know how 'feminized' Catholicism was in the late nineteenth century."62 Male Catholic soldiers indeed turned frequently to praying the rosary, wearing Miraculous Medals and donning scapulars, and they saw such items as not just spiritually nourishing but as physically protective as they enacted their martial manhood on the battlefield. Reverend J. Francis Burlando, the provincial director of the Daughters of Charity in the United States, remembered "poor invalid Catholics and Protestants all going to the chapel of the Sisters to assist at the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, at the Way of the Cross, and other practices of piety! . . . And, what eagerness to obtain a Medal of our Immaculate Mother, a chaplet, an Agnus Dei." Burlando noted that "only when furnished with a medal" would "they return to their regiments."63 Another Catholic writer noted of soldiers receiving both communion and scapulars at a Mass in New Orleans during the first summer of the war, "Ah! would to God every Catholic young man who engages in the conflict may so fortify...

Frado, Linda, Ellen, and Iola

Frado, Linda, Ellen, and Iola Cherene Sherrard-Johnson Like many other budding scholars and writers, I was a voracious reader prone to solitude and imagining "castles in the air" (117). It's no surprise that I would declare publicly that my favorite character from Louisa May Alcott's classic was Jo; however, in secret I also admired Amy's frank penchant for luxury and material comforts. I was never attracted to Meg's dutifulness or Beth's transcendent morality. Yet the scene I most remember is when the Moffats make over Meg into a "newly dressed doll" (76) in "borrowed plumes" (77) in chapter 9, "Meg Goes to Vanity Fair." As one of the few black girls in my private primary school, and later as the only black student in honors classes in my public high school, I knew what it was to constantly feel out of place, to be reminded subtly and overtly of your difference, and to want desperately to belong. That is why this scene at the "small party" (73), where, despite her desire to fit in, Meg has the "queer feeling" (77) of being made a spectacle, is memorable. It's where she and her sisters learn the importance of not judging yourself by the barometers of others but "to know and value the praise which is worth having" (83). Not until I was in graduate school at Cornell University in Lois Brown's class on nineteenth-century black women writers would the names of heroines from African American women's literature become as familiar to me as those from Little Women. The groundbreaking recovery work of Hazel Carby, Ann duCille, Frances Foster, Claudia Tate, and others would exponentially widen my literary landscape. While the March sisters are bemoaning how "dreadful to be poor" and a "Christmas without any presents" (11) in the midst of Civil War, Linda Brent's chapter "Christmas Festivities" describes enslaved women's attempts to "gladden the hearts of their little ones" despite the slave auction that presages "the Slaves' New Year's Day" (Jacobs 118, 15). Slowly, memorable exclamations like Amy's "Oh, Jo, how could you? Your one beauty" (132) in response to Jo's sacrifice of her abundant chestnut hair to bring her father home from the Civil War hospital would be supplanted by Iola Leroy's declaration that she was "tried but not tempted" by white men's propositions (Harper 115). Alcott's autobiographical novel set the standard for a decidedly American, New England girlhood, but nineteenth-century black women authors would deploy sentiment and sensation in their autobiographical fictions for a different objective. [End Page 99] In their hands, Alcott's tropes (with influence from Harriet Beecher Stowe and Lydia Maria Child) became powerful tools of resistance, shining the spotlight on "little women" who were not allowed a true or intact childhood; whose plot trajectories forked not between artistic spinsterhood and marriage, but who became adolescent mothers confronted with a choice for freedom with or without their children; whose domestic labors served others, toiling like the unaffectionately nicknamed Frado as "Nig" under the constant threat of a beating; and whose adventures abroad involved stowing away on a ship (Linda Brent) or gendered and racial passing on a train (Ellen Craft). I'm glad that on its 150th anniversary Little Women can be read intertextually alongside new classics that portray the diversity and texture of what it meant to grow up female in a nation besieged by racial injustice and sexual predation, but with the grounded hope that like Marmee's daughters they would have the opportunity "to be beautiful, accomplished, and good; to be admired, loved, and respected, to have a happy youth, to be well and wisely married, and to lead useful, pleasant lives, with as little care and sorrow to try them as God sees fit to send" (84). [End Page 100] Cherene Sherrard-Johnson University of Wisconsin–Madison Copyright © 2019 University of Nebraska Press

Marsh, John. In Walt We Trust: How a Queer Socialist Poet Can Save America From Itself [review

JOHN MARSH, In Walt We Trust: How Queer Socialist Poet Can Save America From Itself. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2015. 248 pp.In the late pages of In Walt We Trust-a lively and incisive appeal to revisit our national (queer and socialist!) poet in light of the crises facing American today-John Marsh poses the vital ques- tion: kind of person would you be if you read poetry? (203). answer for Marsh is that any careful reader of his poetry could become ideal democratic citizen (203). After all, it was who, while engaging the gravest threats to nineteenth century (slavery, war, and monopoly), staked the future of the republic and Leaves of Grass on the cultivation of strong and inventive readers. Now, in 2015, confronted the largest gap between wealthy and poor citizens since era, those future Americans have justifiably lost faith in polity paralyzed by corporate influence, financial trusts, and the dogged culture wars. Weaving personal anecdotes biography, literary analysis, and political philosophy, Marsh turns Leaves of Grass into self-help guide for our New Gilded Age, complete lessons on to die, to have better sex, what to do money, and how to survive our fetid democracy by becoming better people and readers (16).These themes, spanning thoughts on mortality, economy, love, and governance, structure the book's four chapters. Marsh provides instructive context in each through first-person accounts of his pilgrimages, Leaves of Grass in hand, to variety of Whitman-related sites. He hops the ferry from Brooklyn, seeking contact the hereafter; he roams Occupy Wall Street, reflecting on work and money. In Pennsylvania strip club, he questions America's lingering shame sexual desire. While in Washington, D.C., he visits former Civil War hospitals and recreates the scenes of communion forged soldiers amid national fratricide. And Marsh's conversion to Whitmanism is as personal as it is political. Once young fire-breathing socialist, Marsh confesses to have fallen on the tenure track (22). A disaffected professor, self-medicating alcohol and harboring doubts about the meaning of life and the purpose of our country, he weds personal crisis to national calamity, testament to how the disciple has absorbed his master (11).Indeed, Marsh is an insightful guide to poetry. At the outset, he masterfully parses the opening lines of Song of Myself, exhibiting the passage as the crux of poetics: from his sense of human divinity and scientific inspiration to his faith in death-lessness and direct address to readers. situates the abstract ideas of life and death in the atomic matter redistributed eternally across time, space, and bodies. If every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you, Marsh claims, then our identities are likewise equal and interchangeable (79), and Whitman, affirming egalitarianism through natural law, proves that we inhabit a socialist universe, not capitalist one (60). At this moment, I was reminded of Horace Traubel in Camden relentlessly prodding the elderly on the question of socialism. Traubel, who galvanized generation of American radicals under the banner of the Walt Fellowship, also published dozens of articles in his Conservator that are in the vein of Marsh's work-essays like Whitman and Socialism, Whitman's Significance to the Revolutionist, and The Propaganda is Whitman. All could duly serve as subtitles to In Walt We Trust, which is steeped in Traubel's inheritance. Marsh, like Traubel, finally consents to nimble evasions, deciding he was with the socialists in the result (107).The book's most rewarding section, to my mind, begins Marsh trailing presence around Zuccotti Park, the site of the 2011 Occupy Wall Street protests. …

The Nurse, the Veteran, and the Female Scientist: Dependency and Separation

The discourse that emerged around the female nurses who served in American Civil War hospitals has been a major topic in the debate about nineteenth-century gender relations. What remains obscure, however, is the genesis of this figure during the postwar period and its influence on late nineteenth-century gender relations. Focusing on the post-1865 period as a time of emotional crisis and mental adaptation (Leslie Butler), this article seeks to analyze and assess the gendered tensions that emerged when the process of “binding up the nation’s wounds” (Abraham Lincoln) became a more permanent occupation than was commonly anticipated. By reading Louisa May Alcott’s Hospital Sketches, Silas Weir Mitchell’s “The Case of George Dedlow,” Alonzo F. Hill’s John Smith’s Funny Adventures on a Crutch, and Mary Bradley Lane’s Mizora as contributions to and critical interventions into official veteran memorial culture, this article sheds light on the gendered dimension of the Reconstruction adaptation and negotiation process, and explains why the concept of the female nurse played a crucial role in this development.

Fragmentation of Medicine in the United States

During the 19th century, the United States of America radically and tumultuously transformed from an experiment in democratic governance by a fledgling group of settlers populating the eastern portion of North America to a robust, free, and powerful nation encompassing a greater portion of the continent of North America and dominating technological innovation for the world. The event that served as the major dividing point in this period of development was the American Civil War of the 1860s. Wartimes trigger great social, scientific, and technologic upheavals and the American Civil War was no exception. By the 1860s, science and technology were finally beginning to be incorporated into medical diagnosis and treatment in Europe, which at the time held leadership in this field, whereas in the United States, medical care still often produced more harm than good (eg, accepted therapy for injuries with internal bleeding was bloodletting). Prior to the American Civil War, medical education was wildly variable. Additionally, numerous health care theories and disciplines (some pure charlatanism and quackery) appeared that generally had the important single benefit of being much less injurious (and equally effective or ineffective) than the established ‘‘orthodox’’ medical treatments. Despite the scientific revolution in biomedicine that flowered during the 20th century in the United States, the residua of that that earlier era still plagues health care delivery in the 21st century. Thus, it is critical now to understand history in order to build the bridges across disciplines and between providers to optimize the health and well-being of all patients. To that end, the Journal of Evidence-Based Complementary & Alternative Medicine (JEBCAM) has been able to obtain permission to reproduce material detailing the state of medical training in the United States prior to the American Civil War. This material originally appeared in 4 parts in issues of the award-winning journal Surgeon’s Call, which is published by the National Museum of Civil War Medicine. The National Museum of Civil War Medicine started as an idea of Gordon E. Dammann, DDS, whose collection of medical artifacts from the American Civil War forms the core holdings. The Museum was incorporated in 1990, and in August 1993 the board chose to locate in Frederick, Maryland, which is within a 30-minute drive to 5 major Civil War battlefields: Gettysburg, Pennsylvania; Harpers Ferry, West Virginia; Antietam, Maryland; South Mountain, Maryland; and Monocacy, Maryland. The Carty Building on East Patrick Street, a cityowned building in the heart of Frederick’s historic district, was chosen as the site. The Museum began publishing its originally quarterly newsletter, Surgeon’s Call, and on June 15, 1996, the first exhibits were opened to the public. The exhibits included dioramas, cases, and informational panels on recruiting, camp life, medical evacuation, field hospitals, pavilion hospitals, and the home-front. The displays were highlighted by a Confederate ambulance on loan from the Lincoln Memorial University, a 19th-century holding coffin, stretchers, amputation kits, uniforms of medical personnel, and numerous other medical and surgical items. In 1997, plans were developed to renovate the building with the goal of the design process to tell the story of Civil War medicine in much the same order as it would have been experienced by soldiers themselves: the first gallery establishes the context for the Museum by discussing the state of medicine and medical education at the beginning of the war, while the remaining galleries follow the soldiers through recruitment, camp life, the evacuation of the wounded, field dressing stations, field hospitals, and pavilion hospitals. The last gallery highlights specific subjects such as indigenous plants used by the surgeons, dentistry, naval medicine, and the Civil War hospitals in Frederick. On October 21, 2000, the newly renovated Museum opened its doors to the public. In addition to the exhibit galleries, the Museum has a secure, climate-controlled collections room and a research center. Since the reopening, additional exhibits have been added that study the embalming of the dead, apothecary wagons, and nursing practices during the Civil War. The author of this 4-part article is Dr Robert G. Slawson, a 1962 graduate of the University of Iowa School of Medicine, who spent 8 years in the US Army training in radiology

Gangrene Therapy and Antisepsis Before Lister: The Civil War Contributions of Middleton Goldsmith of Louisville

It is commonly accepted that Louis Pasteur is the father of microbiology and Joseph Lister is the father of antisepsis. Middleton Goldsmith, a surgeon in the Union Army during the American Civil War, meticulously studied hospital gangrene and developed a revolutionary treatment regimen. The cumulative Civil War hospital gangrene mortality was 45 per cent. Goldsmith's method, which he applied to over 330 cases, yielded a mortality under 3 per cent. His innovative work predated Pasteur and Lister, making his success truly remarkable and worthy of historical and surgical note.

The Sparrow’s Fall: Self’s Mergence with Identity in Louisa May Alcott’s Hospital Sketches

In This Republic of Suffering Drew Faust describes Civil War hospitals as “especially dangerous places…nurses—Louisa May Alcott prominent among them—regularly fell victim to typhoid, smallpox, and even heart failure brought on by the conditions and demands of their employment” (140). In the environment Faust describes, Louisa May Alcott “would have given much to have possessed the art of sketching, for many…faces became wonderfully interesting” (33). Alcott’s desire to depict hospitalized soldiers comes to fruition in her 1863 collection of letters turned fiction, Hospital Sketches. Although Alcott’s account is presented as fiction, it contains many levels of truth, embodying the type of story central in most debates concerning truth and authority within autobiography.Alice Fahrs refers to Hospital Sketches as “a fictionalized account of Alcott’s brief experiences as a nurse in Washington” (2) while acknowledging that the story is the product of Alcott’s very real experience written to her family in a series of letters (29). Scholars classify Hospital Sketches as fiction because it is signed by Nurse Periwinkle, Alcott’s narrator and alter ego (24). Elaine Showalter explains that the letters developed into a series of sketches and then into a book: “When she turned the sketches, originally written for the Boston antislavery paper The Commonwealth, into a book, Alcott added…Tribulation Periwinkle, a doughty spinster who goes to Washington because she wants something to do, and not because she understands very well where she is going” (xxvi). Alcott’s experience remains intact but the author does not. Hospital Sketchesstands as an example of how truth and authority in autobiography become suspect, while simultaneously allowing for significance and meaning to emerge.

Comparison of Surgical Care Deficiencies between US Civil War Hospitals and Present‐Day Hospitals in Sierra Leone

Surgery is rapidly becoming a part of public health initiatives in developing countries. In collaboration with the Sierra Leone Ministry of Health and Sanitation, a team of local surgeons and surgeons from the organization Surgeons OverSeas (SOS) used the WHO Tool for Situational Analysis to Assess Emergency Surgical Care to quantify surgical capacity in Sierra Leone. These data were then compared to data collected from the Medical and Surgical History of the Civil War, a work documenting surgical care and hospitals during the US Civil War. There are 0.2 government hospital surgeons/100,000 people in Sierra Leone compared to 300 surgeons/100,000 soldiers in the Union Army. In Sierra Leone it is rare to have running water, fuel, anesthesia, and reliable X-rays. In comparison, US Civil War hospitals had reliable running water, fuel, and anesthesia. It is rare to manage open fractures, limb dislocations, amputations, and conditions requiring chest tubes in Sierra Leone, while these procedures were commonly employed in US Civil War hospitals. Government hospitals in present day Sierra Leone lack the infrastructure, personnel, supplies, and equipment to adequately provide emergency and essential surgical care. In a comparison of present day Sierra Leonean and US Civil War hospitals, the US Civil War facilities are equivalent and in many ways superior. It is hoped that such a comparison will aid advocacy efforts so that greater resources are devoted to improving emergency and essential surgical care in low- and middle-income countries.

Conception: A Personal History

November 19 is Remembrance Day in Gettysburg, the day that Lincoln dedicated part of the battlefield as a cemetery for the Civil War dead in 1863. That year in July the dead lay on the battlefield, on the farmers’ fields planted with crops and in the summer-green woods where they had taken positions behind boulders and tree trunks. Some lay covered with dirt, and others just lay bare to the weather. When land for a cemetery was set aside, the townspeople moved the dead to proper graves. As a citizen of Gettysburg more than a century later, I carry no responsibilities as burdensome as moving thousands of dead bodies for burial. My children and I climb the steep trail of Round Top, scaling the hill’s crowning boulders and dropping down behind them, pushing leaves off of low plaques to learn which soldiers fought where. We acquaint ourselves with the town’s history—I was impressed to hear that the main building on the Gettysburg College campus had been a Civil War hospital. Later I realized that nearly every building standing in 1863 had been, of necessity, a hospital, too. A colleague who commuted here from Maryland once asked, “How can you live in that town? You’re living on the most blood-soaked piece of ground in America.” But this place doesn’t feel blood-soaked. The former hospital buildings are bed-and-breakfasts, or dormitories, or offices. The battlefields roll out like velvet, their hems bordered with silent cannons and marble monuments. Although there was so much death, to my mind it’s safely tucked into the past. [excerpt]

Civil War Hospital

Civil War Hospital

You've Come A Long Way. ..

Jane E. Schultz. Women at the Front: Hospital Workers in Civil War America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004. 376 pp. Illustrations, figures, appendix, bibliography, and index. $34.95. Jane E. Schultz examines female hospital workers in a valuable study that debunks many myths that have grown up around the "angels of mercy" that ministered to the wounded of America's deadliest conflict. Women at the Front represents a solid contribution to the social history of the Civil War and, more specifically, to the role of women in that war. That is, her book is representative of a growing literature that not only provides a more accurate understanding of the significant place women had in the conflict, but also demonstrates gender as a useful category of analysis in Civil War studies.1 In other words, Schultz's book embodies a growing sophistication and maturity in the history of women in the Civil War, a field that has come a long way since such early groundbreaking studies as Mary Elizabeth Massey's Bonnet Brigades (1966). While Schultz clearly empathizes with the women she studies in Women at the Front, her study captures the complexities of Civil War hospital work, nuances that do not always reflect well on these women, but shows them to be complicated human beings attempting to cope with their place in such a large and horrific struggle. Her book also is sensitive to the differences between the experience of northern and southern hospital workers, and she takes pains to differentiate between elite women and their more humble counterparts who usually made up the bulk of the workforce. After a brief introduction, Schultz confidently dives into the wartime experiences of female hospital workers. She begins by examining what sort of women went into hospital work during the Civil War and the nature of the medical system they encountered, North and South. Not surprisingly taking into account the intense mobilization of human resources in both sections, Schultz finds, "Female hospital workers were as diverse as the population of the United States in 1860" (p. 12). Given the competing philosophies of federal versus states' rights, it is also not surprising Schultz finds there was a more centralized hospital system in the North and a more decentralized and informal hospital system in the South. In both sections, elite volunteers led [End Page 71] the effort while working-class women were the bulk of the labor force. She finds that many of the ordinary workers often were paid for their labor; one that encompassed a wide variety of tasks beyond nursing and required much larger numbers (men as well as women) than has previously been credited. Hospital workers quickly developed a hierarchy based on the tasks they performed, with nursing held in the highest regard, and cooking, laundering, and other support tasks less valued. Understandably, Schultz finds elite women gravitated to the high prestige work. After examining who toiled in Civil War hospitals, Women at the Front then deals with how women actually got involved in this work. With separate spheres at its zenith, women in both sections initially encountered resistance as female trailblazers attempted to leave home for hospital work. Yet over time, Schultz asserts, public disapproval of women's medical work declined, especially among the comfortable middle class, as its necessity became apparent to the northern and southern public horrified by the war's terrible human toll. In assessing motives for joining hospital service, she finds they varied considerably from the highly idealistic to women who simply needed the wages hospital work would bring. As Schultz puts it, "the decision to volunteer for hospital work was like soldiers' enlistment. Women were moved variously by patriotism, self-sacrifice, the prospect of adventure, and, of course, money" (p. 47). Hence, Women at the Front advances the notion that women hospital workers saw their service as on par with the troops at the front. Schultz believes these similarities between male soldiers and female hospital workers...

Southern womanhood and slavery: a biography of Louisa S. McCord, 1810-1879

Southern Womanhood and Slavery is the first full-length biography of Louisa S. McCord, one of the most intriguing intellectuals in antebellum America. The daughter of South Carolina planter and politician Langdon Cheves, and an essayist in her own right, McCord supported unregulated free trade and the perpetuation of slavery, and opposed the advancement of women's rights. This study examines the origins of her ideas. Leigh Fought constructs an exciting narrative that follows McCord from her childhood as the daughter of a state representative and president of the Bank of the United States, through her efforts to accept her position as wife and mother, her career as an author and plantation mistress, the Union invasion of South Carolina during the Civil War, and to the end of her life in the emerging New South. Fought analyzes McCord's poetry, letters, and essays in an effort to comprehend her acceptance of slavery and the submission of women. Fought concludes that McCord came to a defense of slavery through her experience with free labor in the north, which also reinforced her faith in the paternalist model for preserving social order. McCord's life as a writer on unfeminine subjects, her reputation as strong-minded and masculine, her late marriage, her continued ownership of her plantation after marriage, and her position as the matron of a Civil War hospital contradicted her own philosophy that women should remain the quiet force behind their husbands. She lived during a time of social flux in which free labor, slavery, and the role of women underwent dramatic changes, as well as a time that enabled her to discover and pursue her intellectual ambitions. Fought examines the conflict that resulted when those ambitions clashed with McCord's role as a woman in the society of the South. McCord's voice was an interesting, articulate, and necessary feminine addition to antebellum, southern, white ideology. Moreover, her story demonstrates the ways in which women negotiated through patriarchy without surrendering their sense of self or disrupting the social order. Engaging and very readable, Southern Womanhood and Slavery will be of special interest to students of southern history and women's studies, as well as to the general reader.

Seldom Thanked, Never Praised, and Scarcely Recognized: Gender and Racism in Civil War Hospitals

Seldom Thanked, Never Praised, and Scarcely Recognized: Gender and Racism in Civil War Hospitals

Memoirs of a Soldier, Nurse, and Spy: A Woman's Adventures in the Union Army

Among the hundreds of women who, in disguise, enlisted to serve as men in the Union army, only Sarah Edmonds is known to have written a memoir recounting her experiences. As Franklin Thompson she joined the 2nd Michigan Infantry Regiment in 1861, then fought in and witnessed some of the bloodiest struggles of the Civil War - from Blackburn's Ford and First Bull Run, through the Peninsula campaign with McClellan's Army of the Potomac, the battle of Fredericksburg, and then to the Kentucky campaign in 1863. When need arose, this woman embarked upon dangerous missions into Confederate territory to gather information and to survey enemy positions, sometimes in the guise of an Irish washerwoman or slave. As an infantry soldier and male nurse, Sarah Edmonds chronicles the horrors of Civil War hospitals and the simple pastimes of camp life. Throughout her memoirs, this storyteller reveals her courage, dedication to the Union, and resourcefulness in sustaining her complicated masquerade.

Whitman and the romance of medicine

In this compelling, accessible examination of one of America's greatest cultural and literary figures, Robert Leigh, Davis details the literary and social significance of Walt Whitman's career as a nurse during the American Civil War. Davis shows how the concept of 'convalescence' in nineteenth-century medicine and philosophy - along with Whitman's personal war experiences - provide a crucial point of convergence for Whitman's work as a gay and democratic writer. In his analysis of Whitman's writings during this period - Drum-Taps, Democratic Vistas, Memoranda During the War, along with journalistic works and correspondence - Davis argues against the standard interpretation that Whitman's earliest work was his best. He finds instead that Whitman's hospital writings are his most persuasive account of the democratic experience. Deeply moved by the courage and dignity of common soldiers, Whitman came to identify the Civil War hospitals with the very essence of American democratic life, and his writing during this period includes some of his most urgent reflections on suffering, sympathy, violence, and love. Davis concludes this study with an essay on the contemporary medical writer Richard Selzer, who develops the implications of Whitman's ideas into a new theory of medical narrative.

Early Practice of Dietetics during the Civil War

LEARNING OUTGONE: To identify at least two ways in which early practitioners of dietetics dealt with malnutrition and disease among soldiers during the American Civil War.Over half of the 600,000 casualties in the American Civil War, fought between 1861 and 1865, were due to disease; despite these grim figures, the fact that others nevertheless did recover from illness and/or wounds is testimony to the combined efforts of many men and women in establishing procedures to provide nourishment and medical care to Union and Confederate soldiers. This investigator has researched diaries, letters, reports, and biographies of surgeons, nurses, commissions, civilians, and soldiers themselves; many of these reveal heroic efforts of individuals both in the north and south to nourish sick and wounded soldiers on the battlefield and in hospitals - often without regard to color of uniform, and at great risk to their own health and safety in unsanitary and dangerous surroundings. Highlights of this history are presented as a special program for dietetics students enrolled in a Foundations of Dietetic Practice course, and includes discussion of 19th century hospital diet kitchen rules, recipes, and procedures. Outside reading is assigned, and examination questions are used to assess learning of dietetics history in the course. Students searching the beginnings of their profession in Civil War hospitals and camps will discover resourceful individuals and groups who paid considerable attention to special dietary needs of soldiers who fought in the bloodiest war of our nation's history.