Rehabilitating Bodies
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The American Civil War is one of the most documented, romanticized, and perennially reenacted events in American history. In Rehabilitating Bodies: Health, History, and the American Civil War , Lisa A. Long charts how its extreme carnage dictated the Civil War's development into a lasting trope that expresses not only altered social, economic, and national relationships but also an emergent self-consciousness. Looking to a wide range of literary, medical, and historical texts, she explores how they insist on the intimate relationship between the war and a variety of invisible wounds, illnesses, and infirmities that beset Americans throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and plague us still today. Long shows how efforts to narrate credibly the many and sometimes illusory sensations elicited by the Civil War led writers to the modern discourses of health and history, which are premised on the existence of a corporeal and often critical reality that practitioners cannot know fully yet believe in nevertheless. Professional thinkers and doers both literally and figuratively sought to rehabilitate—to reclothe, normalize, and stabilize—Civil War bodies and the stories that accounted for them. Taking a fresh look at the work of canonical war writers such as Louisa May Alcott and Stephen Crane while examining anew public records, journalism, and medical writing, Long brings the study of the Civil War into conversation with recent critical work on bodily ontology and epistemology and theories of narrative and history.
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Rehabilitating Bodies
Health, History, and the American Civil War
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And yet the war experience continues to grip his psyche as Whitman’s wound-dresser revisits the Civil War hospital again and again. It is not just Civil War writings themselves that interest me here, but also the dynamics of this incessant rewriting. Scholars have produced tens of thousands of books on the war, the vast majority concerned with “the quest to understand.”24 Dominated still by military and political history, this body of scholarship is largely interested in causes and effects: What caused the Civil War? Why did it take place when it did? Why did the North win and the South lose? What were the decisive military engagements of the conflict? Which men were heroes, and which were cowards? New social histories have expanded the set of questions and the narratives that answer, looking beyond the great men to examine how civilians in general, white women, African Americans, and others experienced the Civil War.25 Although such work questions the presumed objectivity of historical praxis, it does not challenge the premise that historical experience is a verifiable, knowable place, though we may not be able to get to it.
In their assessment of Civil War historiography, James McPherson and William J. Cooper Jr. liken their profession’s progress to “several blind men who tried to describe an elephant—each historian seems to have run his hands over a different part of the evidence … so each one has described a different animal.”26 This story (common in scientific circles) acknowledges the particularity of perspective; moreover, it suggests how one’s proximity to the Civil War evokes bodily disability, or at least forces one to reconsider the nature of one’s sensory relationship to the objects of study, to the bodies of the past. However, the story also relies on the material reality of the elephant—one could not choose a larger and more weighty body to stand in for the presumed coherence and undeniable knowability of the Civil War. It is not the elephant’s fault that no one gets it right. Yet in endowing this historical project with life, McPherson and Cooper suggest that the past is not dead and insentient. Elephant bodies—just as human bodies—are mutable and mortal; perhaps each historian has described a different animal.
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