Kathryn Shively Meier. Nature's Civil War

Kathryn Shively Meier asks a simple question in her book Nature's Civil War: Common Soldiers and the Environment in 1862 Virginia: how did the common soldier survive the cesspools that were Union and Confederate camps in the first full year of the Civil War? These men had substandard shelters, pitiful rations, and polluted water; were subjected to medical care that was worse than most afflictions; and lived in crowded, filthy conditions that bred numerous mortal diseases. Meier's answer is equally simple: self-care, or adaptation to and of the natural environment. Self-care was, Meier asserts, “more effective at keeping soldiers fit than the official army systems” (p. 2). It was particularly successful in treating mental health, Meier suggests, which was ignored in contemporary medical practice and which could positively or negatively affect a soldier's physical condition. To demonstrate how self-care evolved, Meier examines American understandings of health prior to the war (chap. 1), environmental impacts on soldier health (chap. 2), official responses to disease and health care (chap. 3), soldier adaptations to environmental conditions (chap. 4), and the role of straggling as a method of self-care (chap. 5). She limits her study to two major areas of operations in Virginia during 1862—the Shenandoah Valley and the Peninsula—to demonstrate that self-care was not a geographically specific response, but instead represented “a universal set of habits” in the face of wartime environmental stresses (p. 10).

Environmental ethics · Health care · Mental health · Political science · Psychiatry · Spanish Civil War · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · History of Science and Medicine · Law · Psychology · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies