Marrow of Tragedy [Kindle Edition]
Author: Margaret Humphreys | Language: English | ISBN: B00DTTWGY2 | Format: PDF, EPUB
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The Civil War was the greatest health disaster the United States has ever experienced, killing more than a million Americans and leaving many others invalided or grieving. Poorly prepared to care for wounded and sick soldiers as the war began, Union and Confederate governments scrambled to provide doctoring and nursing, supplies, and shelter for those felled by warfare or disease.
During the war soldiers suffered from measles, dysentery, and pneumonia and needed both preventive and curative food and medicine. Family members—especially women—and governments mounted organized support efforts, while army doctors learned to standardize medical thought and practice. Resources in the north helped return soldiers to battle, while Confederate soldiers suffered hunger and other privations and healed more slowly, when they healed at all.
In telling the stories of soldiers, families, physicians, nurses, and administrators, historian Margaret Humphreys concludes that medical science was not as limited at the beginning of the war as has been portrayed. Medicine and public health clearly advanced during the war—and continued to do so after military hostilities ceased.
Direct download links available for Marrow of Tragedy- File Size: 1857 KB
- Print Length: 400 pages
- Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press; 1 edition (July 8, 2013)
- Sold by: Amazon Digital Services, Inc.
- Language: English
- ASIN: B00DTTWGY2
- Text-to-Speech: Enabled
- Lending: Not Enabled
- Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #501,244 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
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The past couple decades have seen the publication of a number of books documenting Civil War medicine. The classics are George Worthington Adams Doctors in Blue published in 1966 and H.H. Cunningham's Doctors in Gray published in 1958. The Society of Civil War Surgeons , founded in 1980, publishes a quarterly journal for its membership of scholars and reenactors. There are at least a dozen books currently in print covering various aspects of the topic. More recent comprehensive treatments, Frank R. Freemon’s Gangrene and Glory: Medical Care during the American Civil War, published in 2001, and Alfred Jay Bollet’s Civil War Medicine: Challenges and Triumphs, published in 2002, beg the question whether another book is necessary or redundant.
Margaret Humphreys promises a gendered approach to Civil War medicine, exploring of how masculine and feminine behaviors and attitudes affected the structure of medical care. The author wisely used this approach as her muse or point of departure and was not heavy handed in its application in subsequent chapters. While most authors of this topic focus primarily on military medicine performed within the combat zone, Humphreys focuses on medical care in the general hospitals established in major towns and cities throughout the country. The book is a study of how the Army Medical Department and concerned civilians adapted and created institutions, such as hospitals and nongovernmental organizations, to deal with an unexpectedly large number of sick and wounded men.
As one would expect from a book that promises a gendered approach, the author explores the role of women as nurses, physicians and social workers. She objectively describes their success as well as their limitations.
Margaret Humphrey’s Marrow of Tragedy: The Health Crisis of the American Civil War (2013) consolidates the scholarship of the past two decades and reviews the material from the perspective of society-wide public health issues. Many Americans during the mid-19th century were accustomed to healing and recovering in a Victorian home sickroom visited by a doctor and attended to by a mother or sister. Home cooked food, served to a sick or injured person lying in clean bed occupying a room with ventilation were the essential elements of regaining personal health. Public hospitals and asylums were used by the poor, travelers, or sailors.
For those who fought it, the Civil War “was less about heroism and more about the daily grind of disease, hunger, death and disability.” [2] Marrow of Tragedy: The Health Crisis of the American Civil War describes a humanitarian revolution that came to grips with the Victorian elites’ cultural understanding of the virtues of honor and heroism, manliness and military service. Within the past two years, an estimate of the war’s death toll rose from 625,000 to more than 750,000 and counting civilians nearly 800,000. Roughly two thirds of military deaths were brought about through disease and approximately 56,000 soldiers died in prison camps during the conflict. It is estimated that 60,000 men lost limbs in the war. Margaret Humphreys understands the Civil War to be the greatest public health disaster in the nation’s lifetime.
Humphreys finds that during wartime the role of women in medicine expanded during debates over the causation and prevention of infectious diseases, the re-design of hospitals, and the limits of proximity that women could approach the battlefields.
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