Reviewed by: Rehabilitating Bodies: Health, History, and the American Civil War Ed Slavishak Rehabilitating Bodies: Health, History, and the American Civil War. By Lisa A. Long. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 2004. Lisa Long’s Rehabilitating Bodies considers how writers struggled in the decades after the Civil War to deal with an event of such scale and suffering. It is not a book about war injuries, per se, but about the way that injury and trauma led to a concerted examination of history, self, and experience. She describes a longstanding obsession with the bodily minutiae of war, a focus that has generated entire industries devoted to publishing, touring, and reenacting the sights and sounds of the battlefield. The book’s success is a testament to Long’s knack for finding new approaches to details not easily assembled and made comprehensible. Long argues that the Civil War created “ontological crises” in medical, literary, and bureaucratic discourses about bodies. Her writers suggested that the war unhinged psyches, racial groupings, and identities. Their inability to narrate the war by explaining away its physical effects led to a troubling sense of instability, beginning with Silas Weir Mitchell’s medical practice for those who were “detached, numb, and out of sync” (34) with their bodies. Postwar nervous diseases confounded Mitchell by turning his patients into unreliable, inscrutable texts. The book ends historiographically with a tour of African American scholars’ turn-of-the-century efforts to narrate black soldiers’ service and sacrifice. Their writings, Long argues, gave history to black bodies that white historians kept in stasis. These chapters share a focus on Americans’ attempt to manage chaos by taking seriously war’s bewildering effects on “flesh and soul.” In the chapters between, Long rehabilitates books that others have criticized for melodrama, clumsiness, and racism. Under her gaze, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s The Gates Ajar offers “a rigorous exploration of the ontological systems stirred by the Civil War and its aftermath” (66). Paul Laurence Dunbar’s The Fanatics explores violent racism with “a subtlety that has been lost on some readers” (163). Narrative dissonance in Louisa May Alcott’s Hospital Sketches becomes an “artful reconstruction” of the “potency and simultaneity of her nursing body” (187). These books all pass through the analytical sieve of bodies and consciousness, revealing how writers offered strategies to deal with war memories. Long does a good job of connecting works with the movements that informed and challenged them in military and civilian life. As a discursive analysis about knowledge, however, the book often leaves such details behind to theorize the wider implications of writing. At times the theory seems unconnected to the lives of the “thinkers and doers” that the book’s dust jacket describes. The introduction, especially, is filled with stylistic moves—frequent references to tropes and epistemes, prefixes in parentheses, etymological tangents, jargon-packed sentences—that might preach to the choir and make the congregation’s eyes roll. To Long’s credit, she reins in the urge to complicate matters with careful [End Page 161] readings that chart the thought processes of men and women who were themselves trying to figure out puzzles with no easy solutions. In other words, she has written as substantial a book about post-Civil War “insubstantialities” as one could imagine. Ed Slavishak Susquehanna University Copyright © 2009 Mid-America American Studies Association
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Apr 26, 2019
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