Jim Downs, Sick from Freedom

For a conflict that, arguably, represented one of the first examples of modern warfare, America's Civil War remains stuck in a time warp as far as its medical history is concerned. Accepting that its timing, pre-asepsis, on the cusp of the discovery of germ theory, was truly unfortunate for many soldiers and civilians, it remains the case that the broader implications of warfare on a national scale, including the impact of conflict on non-combatant populations, have not received the consideration that they merit in the historiography of warfare and medicine more generally, let alone specific studies of America's internecine conflict. When considered at all, the story is too frequently one of failure: the failure of diagnoses, the victory of disease. In some respects, Jim Downs' challenging, meticulously researched and sobering study is not going to alter that traditional trajectory all that much. His is not an uplifting account, either of the medical or the political history of the Civil War. Indeed, published to coincide with the sesquicentennial of the Civil War, and in particular of emancipation, there is a slight sense of history repeating itself in Sick from Freedom. It was in the context of the war's centennial that Richard Shryock argued that, absent an appreciation of its medical aspects, the story of America's Civil War ‘is not only incomplete but is unrealistic as a total picture’, one that ‘fails to make real the tragedy inherent in the entire experience’.1

Context (archaeology · Historiography · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Spanish Civil War · Victory · Historical Medical Research and Treatments · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · Medical History and Innovations · History · Law