United States Sanitary Commission Research Articles

362 Walt Whitman, John Mahay, and Urotrauma in the American Civil War

Walt Whitman (1819-1892) was a visionary American poet who inspired innovation within the literary landscape, choosing to preserve real, complex life with poetic imagery. He also chose to volunteer as a nurse during the American Civil War, daring to confront the violent, painful reality of war’s aftermath with precision and unflinching honesty. Volunteer nursing for the Union Army was organized by the United States Sanitary Commission during the Civil War (1861-1865). Our objective is to investigate the urologic management and perspectives of Walt Whitman during his service as a Nurse during the American Civil War. We conducted a review of the literature pertaining to Walt Whitman, his clinical practice, and his relationship to John Mahay during the Civil War. A review of textbooks, peer-reviewed articles, works of prose, and government archives was performed. Original publications and anatomic diagrams were reviewed through the Walt Whitman Archive and the National Museum of Health and Medicine.

When Service Is Not Enough: Charity's Purpose in the Immediate Aftermath of the Civil War

This essay argues that antebellum notions of charity persisted during the Civil War and its immediate aftermath. Sympathy, rather than an obligation owed those who had served their nation in good stead, remained the criterion on which relief workers judged petitioners. To make the case, the essay considers how the largest wartime private relief agency, the United States Sanitary Commission, provided aid to soldiers who made the wartime transition to veteran status due to injury or illness and those veterans who were mustered out of service in 1865-1866. Equally important, it surveys intellectual and cultural currents that informed the war generation's understanding of charity. Sympathy, it demonstrates, demanded affinity, a shared sense of feeling, an appeal to the heart rather than to reason, but it did not demand inclusivity.

So Conceived and So Dedicated: Intellectual Life in the Civil War–Era North ed. by Lorien Foote and Kanisorn Wongsrichanalai

Reviewed by: So Conceived and So Dedicated: Intellectual Life in the Civil War–Era North ed. by Lorien Foote and Kanisorn Wongsrichanalai J. Matthew Gallman (bio) So Conceived and So Dedicated: Intellectual Life in the Civil War–Era North. Edited by Lorien Foote and Kanisorn Wongsrichanalai. (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015. Pp. 307 Cloth, $105.00; paper $45.00.) This volume contains eleven essays about Civil War–era intellectuals. Any study of intellectual life invites questions about definitions. Lorien Foote offers a useful starting point. These essays are about “educated [End Page 137] people for whom ideas mattered” (2). Foote and her fellow coeditor, Kanisorn Wongsrichanalai, have assembled a superb volume in which the pieces fit together wonderfully. Joan Waugh’s short, charming, and absolutely essential foreword sets the stage. Waugh establishes the centrality of George Fredrickson’s magisterial The Inner Civil War: Northern Intellectuals and the Crisis of the Union (1965) in framing any conversation about the intellectual history of the Civil War, while discussing her own “heavily marked” copy of Fredrickson’s slim volume. Waugh reminds us that Fredrickson the brilliant scholar was also a charming fellow who had no trouble with young scholars who—like Waugh herself—“differed and departed from” the narrative set forth in The Inner Civil War. Nearly every essay in So Conceived and So Dedicated mentions Fredrickson, but none of the authors is intent on merely filling lacunae in the foundational text, and none are set on tearing it down—which, one imagines, is precisely how Fredrickson would have had it. Lorien Foote leads off with a historiographical review of the state of the field, with comments on the other ten essays placed within that larger analysis. This wonderful essay deserves attention on its own, as well as for being an introduction to what is to come. Foote considers three crucial questions that have framed the scholarship since the publication of The Inner Civil War: Did the Civil War shift intellectual thought toward modernization? Did it lead intellectuals to embrace “authoritarian modes of thought” (8)? How did the Civil War shape notions of nationalism? Foote’s essay and notes reward careful reading. The questions, methods, and voice employed in the other ten essays are diverse, but the pieces join together in multiple conversations. The authors interact with one another implicitly, and on multiple occasions they explicitly engage with other essays in the volume. The mix of senior scholars and more junior authors is excellent. Together they map out some of the ways scholars are rethinking intellectual history in the Civil War era. Kathryn Shively Meier considers the medical professionals who became involved in the United States Sanitary Commission, while—in a marvelously complementary piece—Susan-Mary Grant looks at the thoughts and experiences of those surgeons who actually worked for the military. In an interesting counter to some familiar narratives, Julie Mujic asks how professors in midwestern universities responded to the particular challenges they faced when their pupils clamored to go to war. Kanisorn Wongsrichanalai flips that tale by considering how antebellum and wartime experiences shaped the postwar activities of three prominent soldiers-turned-educators. [End Page 138] Other authors adopt comparable forms of collective biography, contemplating selected members of key groups. Christian G. Samito examines two Irish Catholics who became prominent prowar Republicans, while William Kurtz finds generally conservative impulses in the writings of a cohort of Catholic editors and archbishops. David Zimring complicates our understanding of the relationship between geography and identity by examining northerners who moved south and largely embraced the politics of their adopted home. Two essays focus on a single figure. Richard F. Miller uncovers the crusade of one New England lawyer to produce empirically sound, fundamentally nonpartisan historical writing about the war; Niki Lefebvre broadens the interpretive lens with a close reading of one artist’s representation of an African American soldier in Harper’s Weekly. Finally, Richard Newman’s intellectually challenging contribution looks at metaphorical discourse surrounding the health of the body politic to reconsider thoughts on the meaning of race and emancipation both during and after the war. These essays should produce scores of “heavily marked” copies for decades to come. Consider just two...

This Birth Place of Souls: The Civil War Nursing Diary of Harriet Eaton (review)

Reviewed by: This Birth Place of Souls: The Civil War Nursing Diary of Harriet Eaton Margaret Humphreys (bio) This Birth Place of Souls: The Civil War Nursing Diary of Harriet Eaton. Edited by Jane E. Schultz. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. Pp. 350. Cloth, $74.00.) In her prior work on female health workers in the Civil War, Jane Schultz has set a standard for understanding the role of women in that vast conflict. Women at the Front: Hospital Workers in Civil War America (2007) greatly expanded our knowledge of these women, revealing their varied purposes, functions, and aspirations. In this volume Schultz extends this focus, taking up the story of Harriet Eaton, a war relief worker from Maine who left us a wonderful, detailed diary. While Schultz's first book might be briefly referred to as a "history of nurses in the war," Schultz herself was careful not to put the word "nurse" in her title. The role of "nurse" with all of its modern connotations did not exist in the 1860s, and instead women in hospitals acted in ways that extended their usual behaviors in the domestic sphere. Yes, they gave medicine, fed the bed-bound, helped the surgeon change dressings, and assisted in keeping the patient clean. But women hospital workers also cooked, did laundry, supervised convalescent soldiers who were detailed as nurses, distributed items of clothing, saw to housekeeping tasks, and comforted the men with reading, music, and writing letters home. In southern hospitals much of this work was done by slaves or freedwomen, further confusing the issue. Defining who a nurse was and what a nurse did in any given hospital is a complex task for the historian, and when Schultz calls her manuscript source for This Birth Place of Souls a "nursing diary" in the subtitle, she is somewhat overriding the very complexity that her own work has demonstrated. Eaton herself proclaimed that "the work in which we were engaged differed materially from that of a nurse in the Army" (226). Most Union relief workers generally served under the auspices of the United States Sanitary Commission and the Christian Commission. While the work of women within the USSC has been well explored by historians Judith Giesberg and Jeannie Attie, state relief workers have remained largely invisible. Thus Schultz's volume on Eaton writes a new chapter on women in the war. In the fall of 1862 the Maine Camp Hospital Association hired Eaton, a forty-four-year-old widow from Portland, to help distribute relief supplies to the men in Maine regiments who were deployed in Virginia and Maryland. After Antietam word came back home of wounded and ill men suffering from inadequate food, clothing, and bedding; the society gathered supplies and sent Eaton and a colleague to northern Virginia to help. In her first seven-month tour Eaton traveled from regiment to regiment, [End Page 104] visited their field hospitals, and passed out supplies and facilitated communication with families back in Maine by writing letters for the men, or sending sad missives telling parents of their son's demise. Such "roving nurses" were unusual, as Schultz emphasizes. After recovering from an illness, Eaton was back at war work in 1864, this time in the receiving hospitals at City Point, Virginia. By this point in the war the Union medical corps had become much more efficient at moving wounded and sick men from the battlefield and camp, and there was less need for aid workers in the field. Instead these volunteers were limited to transportation hubs such as City Point, which served as a gathering point for the transfer of incapacitated Union soldiers to the hospitals of the North. Eaton's diary and letters provide ample fodder for historians interested in a variety of topics. Details on the foods distributed provide insight into the nutrition supplied for the ill soldier. Eaton made gruel out of canned chicken; distributed lemons, oranges, and apples; made drinks from condensed milk; lamented an unusual absence of sugar; and otherwise revealed the bounty and variety of foods available to the Union troops. Eaton, like other female hospital workers elsewhere, challenged the behavior of doctors who she felt maltreated...

Women hold up half the sky

Women hold up half the sky

Civil War pharmacy: a history of drugs, drug supply and provision, and therapeutics for the Union and Confederacy

* Foreword * Acknowledgments * Part I: Setting the Stage--Civilian Aspects of Pharmacy During the Civil War * Chapter 1. Civil War Pharmacy and Medicine: Comparisons and Contexts * Historiography of Civil War Pharmacy * American Pharmacy and Medicine at Midcentury * Pharmacy and Medicine in the Civil War: An Overview * Role of Disease * Chapter 2. State of Pharmacy in America, 1861 * Education * Manufacturing * Community Practice * Southern Medicine and Pharmacy * Summary * Chapter 3. Angels of Mercy: Women and Civil War Pharmacy * Woman's Role: Call to Plain Positive * United States Sanitary Commission * Women in the South * Women and Civil War Pharmacy: An Appraisal * Part II: Pharmacy in the Union * Chapter 4. Principals: Medical Purveyors and Hospital Stewards * Official Duties and Responsibilities of Medical Purveyors * Official Duties and Responsibilities of Hospital Stewards * Rank and Status of Medical Purveyors and Hospital Stewards * Chapter 5. Supplies: Drug Distribution and Manufacturing * Drug Acquisition and Supply: Organizational and Operational Aspects * Free Enterprise Joins the War: Civilian Suppliers * Laboratories * Chapter 6. Medicines: A Military Materia Medica and Therapeutics * Ailments * Substances * Prescribing and Dispensing in Camp and Hospital * Unit and Patient Case Studies * Chapter 7. Remedies of Choice: Calomel and Quinine * Mastodon Unharnessed * Quinine: Always and Everywhere * Quinine Market * Summary * Part III: Pharmacy in the Confederacy * Chapter 8. Administration * Civilian Aspects of Confederate Pharmacy Administration * Medical Purveyors and Hospital Stewards * Administrative Aspects of Supply and Drug Provision * Chapter 9. Fighting More with Less * Disease in the Confederacy * Blockade * Supply Table * Laboratories * Fighting More with Less: An Appraisal * Chapter 10. Materia Medica * Prescribing and Dispensing in Camp, Hospital, and Home * Wartime Shortages Take Their Toll * Medicines of the South: An Appraisal * Epilogue. The Consciousness of Duty Faithfully Performed: An Appraisal of Civil War Pharmacy * Impact of the War * Conclusion * Appendix A. Union and Confederate Standard Supply Tables * Appendix B. Circular No. 6 * Appendix C. How to Read and Fill a Civil War Prescription * A Glossary of Latin Phrases and Approximate Measures * Excerpt from Hospital Steward's Manual, 1862 * Appendix D. Circular No. 3 * Appendix E. A Materia Medica for the South: A Selected List of Medicinal Substances from Porcher's Resources of the Southern Fields and Forests * Appendix F. Some Common Prescriptions of the Civil War Period Including the Basic Syrups with Monographs on the Principal Substances: Alcohol, Cinchona, Hydrargyrum (Mercury), Opium, and Quinine * Common Prescriptions * Basic Syrups * Alcohol * Hydrargyrum (Mercury) * Cinchona * Opium * Quinine and Its Salts * Notes * Bibliographical Essay * Index * Reference Notes Included

Rehabilitating bodies: health, history, and the American Civil War

Introduction. Year That Trembled and Reel'd beneath Me Chapter 1. Doctors' Bodies: Dr. S. Weir Mitchell and Patient Malingering Chapter 2. Dead Bodies: Mourning Fictions and the Corporeity of Heaven Chapter 3. Sanitized Bodies: The United States Sanitary Commission and Soul-Sickness Chapter 4. Experimental Bodies: African American Writers and the Rehabilitation of War Work Chapter 5. Soldiers' Bodies: Historical Fictions and the Sickness of Battle Chapter 6. Nursing Bodies: Civil War Women and Postbellum Regeneration Chapter 7. Historical Bodies: African American Scholars and the Discipline of History Epilogue. Conjuring Civil War Bodies Notes Bibliography Index Acknowledgments

A Clearing in the Distance: Frederick Law Olmsted and America in the Nineteenth Century.

In a brilliant collaboration between writer and subject, the bestselling author of Home and City Life illuminates Frederick Law Olmsted's role as a major cultural figure and a man at the epicenter of nineteenth-century American history. We know Olmsted through the physical legacy of his stunning landscapes -- among them, New York's Central Park, California's Stanford University campus, Boston's Back Bay Fens, Illinois's Riverside community, Asheville's Biltmore Estate, and Louisville's park system. He was a landscape architect before that profession was founded, designed the first large suburban community in the United States, foresaw the need for national parks, and devised one of the country's first regional plans. Olmsted's contemporaries knew a man of even more extraordinarily diverse talents. Born in 1822, he traveled to China on a merchant ship at the age of twenty-one. He cofounded The Nation magazine and was an early voice against slavery. He wrote books about the South and about his exploration of the Texas frontier. He managed California's largest gold mine and, during the Civil War, served as general secretary to the United States Sanitary Commission, the precursor of the Red Cross. Olmsted was both ruthlessly pragmatic and a visionary. To create Central Park, he managed thousands of employees who moved millions of cubic yards of stone and earth and planted over 300,000 trees and shrubs. In laying it out, we determined to think of no results to be realized in less than forty years, he told his son, Rick. I have all my life been considering distant effects and always sacrificing immediate success and applause to that of the future. To this day, Olmsted's ideas about people, nature, and society are expressed across the nation -- above all, in his parks, so essential to the civilized life of our cities. Rybczynski's passion for his subject and his understanding of Olmsted's immense complexity and accomplishments make this book a triumphant work. In A Clearing in the Distance, the story of a great nineteenth-century American becomes an intellectual adventure.

Patriotic Toil: Northern Women and the American Civil War

During the Civil War, the United States Sanitary Commission attempted to replace female charity networks and traditions of voluntarism with a centralized organization to ensure that women's support for the war effort served an elite, liberal vision of nationhood. After years of debate over women's place in the democracy and status as citizens, soldier relief work offered women an occasion to demonstrate their patriotism and their rights to inclusion in the body politic. Exploring the economic and ideological conflicts that surrounded women's unpaid labor on behalf of the Union army, Jeanie Attie reveals the impact of the Civil War on the gender structure of nineteenth-century America. She illuminates how the war became a testing ground for the gendering of political rights and the ideological separation of men's and women's domains of work and influence.

In Search of Women of African Descent Who Served in the Civil War Union Navy

The author was first introduced to Ann Stokes during the summer of 1995 at the National Archives in Washington, D.C. while working full-time as a researcher for the African-American Civil War Sailor Project.(1) As part of a team of graduate students from Howard University, the author spent the summer recording thousands of names of black sailors from the extant muster rolls of ships that served in the Union Navy. The work was tedious and mind numbing at times, as the team struggled with oversized bound volumes of handwritten, sometimes faded entries searching for descriptive words, such as Negro, black, contraband, slave, brown, yellow, mulatto, that would identify a sailor as a man of African descent. Imagine the team's surprise when they encountered the name Beverly the first time on the muster rolls. Initially it was assumed that the sailor was a woman, but the rating of a first-class fireman and the occupation of a blacksmith quickly dispelled that assumption. Later appearances of the name for different individuals brought the realization that Beverly must have been a common name for men, as well as women, in the 19th century, just as Taylor and Michael are used today for either gender. As a U.S. Navy veteran, the author was particularly disappointed because she hoped that the research had uncovered a black woman - perhaps the first - who had enlisted in the Navy during the Civil War. Further examination of muster rolls revealed two names that were definitely identified as women: Harriet Ruth, a nurse who served on the U.S.S. Black Hawk, with her husband, Alfred, the Admiral's Cook; and Harriet Little, also a nurse who served along with Samuel Little (presumably her husband), who was also designated a nurse on the U.S.S. Hartford. Finding some black women serving as nurses in the Union Navy during the Civil War should not be considered unusual. We know that the Army used female nurses. Susie King Taylor's account of her service as a laundress, nurse and teacher for the Colored Troops in South Carolina speaks to the contribution black women made in Army camps, on the battlefield, and at military hospitals. Harriet Tubman also served as a nurse, spy and scout for the Union army during the war. But, other than these few well-known personalities, the numerous other women of African descent who served the Union war effort as laundresses, nurses, cooks and matrons remain nameless and voiceless. Some of their stories are now being marginally illuminated through current research. This research has unearthed some unexpected and unusual anomalies surrounding the presence of black women aboard Union ships and at land stations. The first oddity was finding a 45-year-old woman enlisted as a first-class boy at a Navy hospital in North Carolina. The second curiosity was finding a large number of black women serving in different capacities aboard the hospital ship U.S.S. Red Rover, of the Mississippi Squadron, who apparently were not contract employees. Contract nurses were civilians who worked for the government as employees but were not considered enlisted in the military. Black women, as well as their white counterparts, served in this capacity. And the last anomaly was Ann Stokes, a woman who may well be the first to enlist in the United States Navy and the first to receive a Navy Invalid Pension for her service during the Civil War. At the outset of the war nursing in the military was an exclusively male position. During the 1862 Peninsular Campaign in Virginia elite northern women, of European descent, volunteered to work under the auspices of the United States Sanitary Commission, a civilian organization that supplied limited medical care and humanitarian aid to wounded Union soldiers. Dorothea Dix, newly commissioned superintendent of Army Nurses, took charge of the lady volunteers who staffed the United States Sanitary Commission's floating hospitals around Washington, D. …

Gender Equity and the Civil War

Gender Equity and the Civil War Lee Chambers-Schiller (bio) Elizabeth D. Leonard. Yankee Women: Gender Battles in the Civil War. New York: Norton, 1994. xxv 308 pp. Notes, select bibliography, and index. $23.00. John F. Marszalek. The Diary of Miss Emma Holmes, 1861–1866. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1994. xxxiii 496 pp. Map, illustrations, and index. $16.95 (paper). Recent studies of the Civil War have served to debunk persistent myths about women’s primary relation to the war as weeping widows, self-sacrificing wives, patriotic fiancees, and loyal daughters. Yet the degree to which wars represent milestones in women’s pursuit of social, economic, and political equality remains contested. The two works under consideration here reinforce our sense that North and South provided different experiences for white, middle- and upper-class women. Elizabeth Leonard asks if the wartime work of northern women influenced popular perceptions of women’s abilities; if home front production contributed to the readiness of soldiers; if home front activities generated respect for women’s organizational talents or opened up new opportunities for women; and if participation reinforced self-reliance and self-esteem in women or stimulated their ambition. Looking at the front-line work of three unusual women — Annie Wittenmyer of Iowa, a charity worker who first turned her organizational skills to collecting and distributing troop supplies and then to establishing dietary kitchens to provide nutritious food for the wounded; Sophronia Bucklin, a New York nurse of Union soldiers; and Mary Evans Walker, a licensed doctor who adopted male dress and pursued an appointment as military surgeon — Leonard finds in the affirmative. In contrast to Lori Ginzberg (Women and the Work of Benevolence, 1990), who saw the war as transforming the ideology of benevolence, Leonard finds that women’s war work drew heavily upon the antebellum ideology of women’s nature and sphere. Ginzberg believes that wartime benevolence heightened changes emerging in the 1850s by replacing the antebellum ideology of gender difference and female moral superiority with a new ideology of [End Page 612] gender similarity and a more masculine ethos of discipline and efficiency. Leonard asserts that white, middle-class, Yankee, charitable women appropriated the antebellum moral definition of womanhood and, in particular, woman’s unique moral responsibility for maintaining community and her natural selflessness and caretaking abilities, to expand the boundaries of woman’s proper place. So too, nurses and doctors, cooks and laundresses, “by virtue of their own determination and courage, brought forth positive changes in popular characterizations of middle-class womanhood that, in turn, opened new doors for women in the professions and in public life” (p. 200). Perhaps the conflict between Ginzberg and Leonard is most clearly seen in their assessment of the themes of postwar histories of women’s wartime service. Leonard views these works as extolling women’s self-sacrifice and ability to cooperate with men, as downplaying women’s demands for professional status and pay, and as ignoring the scope of women’s administrative and organizational genius in an effort to redirect women back into voluntary benevolence. Ginzberg identifies these same works as praising the efficiency of the new centralized and national charitable organizations, women’s wage-earning capacity, and their subordination of feminine feeling and enthusiasm to business-like and war-like routinization and order. Ginzberg asserts that two sets of values — older notions of benevolence and new demands of public service — were at war in the North, a war that can be plotted through tensions about paying wages, centralizing corporate functions of benevolence, relating benevolence to government, and using funds for administrative — as opposed to strictly charitable — purposes. Her conclusion is that wartime masculinization of the ideology of benevolence pushed women further from both the symbolic and the real centers of power for social change and hastened in a class-based alliance for social welfare. Leonard, on the other hand, argues that many women resisted the efficiency and businesslike routinization of the United States Sanitary Commission and abhorred its centrally directed assessment of charitable needs in national terms. They continued to work independently and retained local control of the supplies they collected, channeling their war effort through the U.S. Christian...

In Service to the Fifth Wheel: Katharine Prescott Wormeley and Her Experiences in the United States Sanitary Commission

In Service to the Fifth Wheel: Katharine Prescott Wormeley and Her Experiences in the United States Sanitary Commission

The United States Sanitary Commission and Thomas Starr King in California, 1861-1864

The United States Sanitary Commission and Thomas Starr King in California, 1861-1864

The Western Sanitary Commission.

Eighty years ago, in addressing the Mississippi Valley Historical As- sociation, Roland G. Usher remarked: Probably the name Western Sanitary Commission connotes little more to most students of the Civil War than the fact, so naturally inferred from the name itself, that it was a western philanthropic society engaged on a small scale in that humane work for which the United States Sanitary Commission and the United States Christian Commission were so noted. Usher reported that histories of the period gave it, at most, one or two lines. Regrettably this still holds true today. Only three works of recent vintage, other than local histories, have given the WSC more than scant attention. William Quentin Maxwell's Lincoln's Fifth Wheel (1956) discusses it as a thorn in the flesh of the USSC and gives a fleeting paragraph or two to the scope of its work. Robert Bremner's monumental study The Public Good (1980) acknowledges it as a separate organization and gives passing recognition to certain aspects of its work, primarily that with refugees. Louis Gerteis in his study From Contraband to Freedman (1973) cites the efforts of the WSCs president, James E. Yeatman, among blacks in the lower Mississippi Valley but says nothing about the broader role of the WSC in that area.' Yet the Western Sanitary Commission played a critical role in helping to alleviate suffering by troops and refugees in the Mississippi Valley and the Trans-Mississippi Theater during the Civil War while fiercely asserting its independence from its better known counterpart, the United States Sanitary Commission. Arising out of the peculiar circumstances of the war in Missouri, before war's end the WSC would receive and

Private Organizations, Public Purposes: Nonprofits and Their Archives

From time of Revolution onward, Americans have used nonprofit organizations for purposes most European nations assign to state. Indeed initially, as Oscar Handlin and Mary F. Handlin demonstrated in their classic study of state economic policy, American legislators and courts drew an uncertain distinction between public, government agencies and what later came to be seen as private corporations, whether for-profit or nonprofit. In case of nonprofit organizations, distinction remains unclear. The Dartmouth College case (1819) went far to establish autonomy of private charitable trusts, but it did not end American practice of assigning state powers to nonprofit organizations; as Daniel Webster put it in his brief, Dartmouth was private charity controlled by private trustees: the use being public, in no way diminishes their legal estate in property. The powers granted private United States Sanitary Commission by surgeon general during Civil War found counterparts of a sort in mail-policing authority granted by federal postal authorities to Anthony Comstock and other agents of Society for Suppression of Vice and authority over children assigned by nineteenth-century states to private orphanages and humane societies. The phenomenon continues to this day, for example, in delegation of arrest powers by city of Cleveland, Ohio, to security officers employed by such private, nonprofit,

"To Increase the Efficiency of the Medical Department": A New Approach to U.S. Civil War Medicine.

"TO INCREASE THE EFFICIENCY OF THE MEDICAL DEPARTMENT": A NEW APPROACH TO U.S. CIVIL WAR MEDICINE Bonnie Ellen Blustein "The connection of science and war is by no means a new phenomenon ," wrote J. D. Bernal in 1939. "This is not due to any mystical affinity between science and war, but to the more elementary considerations that the urgency of war needs, expressed in willingness to incur expenditure , are greater than those of any civil needs, and that in war novelty is at a premium." Historical studies of wartime medicine and other sciences have usually produced essentially quantitative estimates of the "extent" to which the war influenced medical development, and wartime progress is understood mainly as a list of benchmarks on an assumed scale of achievement.1 What has been too often ignored, at least in the study of American medicine during the Civil War period, is the qualitative change resulting from, and underpinning, this roster of accomplishments. This study of medical science in the Union army explores the interconnections between the reorganization of the U.S. Army Medical Department and mid-century American medicine as a whole. "Progress" in U.S. military medicine can best be understood, in primarily qualitative terms, as the solution of particular, historically rooted problems posed An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 1981 annual meeting of the American Association for the History of Medicine, Toronto; I am grateful to the members of the AAHM for the many useful comments and criticisms I received there. Also, I especially thank Kathryn Russell and John T. Cumbler for their patient, sharp, and insightful criticism of preliminary drafts, and Barbara Foley and Richard Cooper for suggestions at a later stage. The research for this paper was funded in part by a grant from the American Philosophical Society. ' J. D. Bernal, The Social Function of Science, (Cambridge, Mass.: The M.I.T. Press, 1967), 165; for a classic description of this approach, see Herbert Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History, (London: G. Bell, 1931) ; see also Robert Nisbet, A History of the Idea of Progress, (New York: Basic Books, 1980). Civil War History, Vol. XXXIII, No. 1, © 1987 by The Kent State University Press MEDICAL DEPARTMENT 23 by an elite (lay and medical) with reference to the material needs and ideological conceptions of the northern upper class. The task of radical reorganization of the military medical services gave impetus in turn to the adoption of what has been called "scientism" as a central part of the ideology of this class in the postwar period. Furthermore, the Civil War experience was critically important in setting not only the pace but the pattern of civilian medical science and practice in the last third of the century. Leonard Curry has thoroughly documented the activerole of the first Civil War Congress in "drafting the blueprint for a new social order." Although his analysis of civil legislation necessarily omits thereorganization of the Army Medical Department, this same Congress enacted the main measures authorizing reorganization. In subsequent decades, moreover, dramatically changed modes of medical thought and practice would become part of the new order. Curry's metaphor is most suggestive in the light of David Noble's important conclusions drawn from his study of technology since the nineteenth century. Noble emphasizes that "the task of designing America has . . . been an ongoing social process, one marked as much by human conflict (and design failure ) as by smoothly running machinery. . . . However impersonally the 'problems' might be formulated, the main challenge has always been people, people with a different vision perhaps, with equally rational but nevertheless conflicting aims."2 This theme will run throughout the present study. The United States Sanitary Commission (USSC) played a leading role in organizing the provision of health care for Union troops, especially the tens of thousands in volunteer regiments, from almost the outset of the war. The leaders and most other commissioners came from the elite of New York City and other northern commercial and manufacturing centers.3 For them, medical reform was part and parcel of the general war aim: national unification in accordance with a "blueprint for modern America" conceived and dominated by representatives of the...

Frontier and Civilization in the Thought of Frederick Law Olmsted

BORN IN 1822, FREDERICK LAW OLMSTED PURSUED MANY VOCATIONS before his death in 1903. A gentleman farmer in New York and Connecticut in the 1840s interested in scientific agriculture, he became one of the most popular travel writers of the next decade, renowned for his detailed observations of Southern life. His literary activities included editing the cosmopolitan Putnam's Magazine and being one of the founders of the Nation. During the Civil War he enlarged his reputation by serving as the executive secretary of the United States Sanitary Commission, and he continued to espouse civil service reform during the Gilded Age. Beginning with the design of Central Park in 1857, he planned most of the early parks in the major American cities; today, his fame rests mainly on his contribution to landscape architecture. Forty years ago, in a highly original study of late nineteenth-century American culture, Lewis Mumford indicated the extent of Olmsted's achievements and his significance in urban planning.' More recently, with the rise of new interests in the history of the environment and urban history, Olmsted has been rediscovered. His reports on city parks have been edited and reissued, his proposals for national and local park systems reassessed, and his designs appreciated.2 However, even the most probing analyses of

Thomas Starr King and the Mercy Million

Research Article| December 01 1964 Thomas Starr King and the Mercy Million Russell M. Posner Russell M. Posner Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar California Historical Society Quarterly (1964) 43 (4): 291–307. https://doi.org/10.2307/25155673 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Russell M. Posner; Thomas Starr King and the Mercy Million. California Historical Society Quarterly 1 December 1964; 43 (4): 291–307. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/25155673 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter All ContentCalifornia History Search This content is only available via PDF. Copyright 1964 The California Historical Society Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Lincoln's Fifth Wheel: The Political History of the United States Sanitary Commission. By William Quentin Maxwell. Preface by Allan Nevins. (New York: Longmans, Green and Company. 1956. Pp. xii, 372. $5.00.)

Journal Article Lincoln's Fifth Wheel: The Political History of the United States Sanitary Commission. By William Quentin Maxwell. Preface by Allan Nevins. (New York: Longmans, Green and Company. 1956. Pp. xii, 372. $5.00.) Get access Lincoln's Fifth Wheel: The Political History of the United States Sanitary Commission. By Maxwell William Quentin. Preface by Nevins Allan. (New York: Longmans, Green and Company. 1956. Pp. xii, 372. $5.00.) Richard H. Shryock Richard H. Shryock Johns Hopkins University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The American Historical Review, Volume 62, Issue 2, January 1957, Pages 415–416, https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr/62.2.415 Published: 01 January 1957

Lincoln's Fifth Wheel: The Political History of the United States Sanitary Commission

Lincoln's Fifth Wheel: The Political History of the United States Sanitary Commission