Marrow of Tragedy: The Health Crisis of the American Civil War

Abstract

The medical history of the Civil War has a fairly extensive historiography, beginning with the flurry of first-person narrative accounts by nurses, hospital stewards, surgeons, medical purveyors, and other assorted healthcare providers (official and unofficial) that kept American presses busy in the years following the war. The lull in such writing that followed from the 1920s on was not broken until George Worthington Adams issued the first important secondary treatment of Civil War medicine with Doctors in Blue (New York: Henry Schuman, 1952), followed a few years later by H. H. Cunningham's Doctors in Gray (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1958). Both were professional historians who produced what have become the standard classics in the field. But curiously Clio's official cadre did not follow, leaving the work of refining the Adams/Cunningham coverage predominantly to physicians-turned-historians. Up until the present, it is a fair assessment that while some very useful and important studies have been produced on various aspects of Civil War medicine, no general medical history of this great American crucible could be said to fully meet current methodological standards. The works by Adams and Cunningham remain useful companion volumes, but the lack of references can be frustrating, and some of the conclusions in each need revision in light of subsequent scholarship. Many of the physician-authored volumes are well intentioned but lack depth of analysis and suffer from bouts of presentism and even an exasperating sort of professional solipsism that often ignores pertinent work by social, economic, political, and even medical historians.

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