Author: Christopher E. Loperfido Publisher: ISBN: 9781611213591 Category : New York (State) Languages : en Pages : 168
Book Description
"Union surgeon James Dana Benton witnessed firsthand the suffering and death brought about by the ghastly wounds, infections, and diseases that wreaked havoc to both the Union and Confederate armies. A native of New York, Dr. Benton penned a series of letters throughout the war to his family relating his experiences with the 111th New York Infantry as an assistant surgeon, and later with the 98th New York as surgeon. His unique correspondence, together with insights from author Chris Loperfido, coalesce to produce Death and Disease in the Civil War: A Union Surgeon's Correspondence from Harpers Ferry to Richmond. Dr. Benton was present for some of the war's most gruesome and important battles, including Gettysburg, Cold Harbor, and the siege of Petersburg. He was also present at Harpers Ferry, Second Battle of Auburn, Battle of Morton's Ford, and Abraham Lincoln's second Inaugural address. His pen offers an insightful and honest look into what everyday life was like for the surgeons who tirelessly worked to save the men who risked their lives for the preservation of the nation. Loperfido's Death and Disease in the Civil War should be read by every student of the Civil War to better understand and come to grips with what awaited the wounded and the medical teams once the generals were finished with their work"--Provided by publisher.
Author: Christopher Loperfido Publisher: Casemate Publishers ISBN: 1940669731 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 173
Book Description
A collection of letters from a Union surgeon in the American Civil War, revealing what life was like for a doctor and a soldier in that era. Union surgeon James Dana Benton witnessed firsthand the suffering and death brought about by the ghastly wounds, infections, and diseases that wreaked havoc to both the Union and Confederate armies. A native of New York, Dr. Benton penned a series of letters throughout the war to his family relating his experiences with the 111th New York Infantry as an assistant surgeon, and later with the 98th New York as surgeon. This unique correspondence—which covers a wide array of topics beyond medicine and the treatment of the injured—is the basis of Death, Disease, and Life at War: The Civil War Letters of Surgeon James D. Benton, 111th and 98th New York Infantry Regiments, 1862-1865. Dr. Benton was present for some of the war’s most gruesome and important battles, including Gettysburg, Cold Harbor, and the siege of Petersburg. He was also present for the fall of Harpers Ferry, Abraham Lincoln’s second Inaugural address, and the collapse of Richmond. His pen offers an insightful and honest look into the everyday life of not only a Union surgeon, but also an officer who suffered the same basic hardships other soldiers in the ranks endured. Chris Loperfido’s Death, Disease, and Life at War is a valuable addition to the Civil War bookshelf. “More than 600,00 men perished in the Civil War, and many more were wounded or fell ill. Prompt and timely attention from an army surgeon was often the difference between life and death. James Benton’s letters home provide a compelling glimpse into the everyday life of these doctors—their concerns and frustrations, their patients and colleagues, the places visited, and their opinions on the war. I commend Christopher Loperfido for bringing this interesting slice of the war to light.” —Scott L. Mingus, Sr., award-winning author of Confederate General William “Extra Billy Smith”: From Virginia’s Statehouse to Gettysburg Scapegoat “Loperfido’s excellent arrangement of [Benton’s] letters provide[s] a compelling look at the life of a Union doctor during a time when the practice of medicine was still primitive and an understanding of health in general was scanty at best. Death, Disease, and Life at War is another valuable piece to the puzzle of understanding what it was like to serve in the Civil War.” —Meg Groeling, author of The Aftermath of the Battle: The Burial of the Civil War Dead
Author: Drew Gilpin Faust Publisher: Vintage ISBN: 0375703837 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 385
Book Description
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST • An "extraordinary ... profoundly moving" history (The New York Times Book Review) of the American Civil War that reveals the ways that death on such a scale changed not only individual lives but the life of the nation. An estiated 750,000 soldiers lost their lives in the American Civil War. An equivalent proportion of today's population would be seven and a half million. In This Republic of Suffering, Drew Gilpin Faust describes how the survivors managed on a practical level and how a deeply religious culture struggled to reconcile the unprecedented carnage with its belief in a benevolent God. Throughout, the voices of soldiers and their families, of statesmen, generals, preachers, poets, surgeons, nurses, northerners and southerners come together to give us a vivid understanding of the Civil War's most fundamental and widely shared reality. With a new introduction by the author, and a new foreword by Mike Mullen, 17th Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Author: Bonnie Brice Dorwart Publisher: National Museum of Civil War Medicine ISBN: 9780971223363 Category : Medicine, Military Languages : en Pages : 170
Book Description
"The present work, a product of six years of research using primary sources of the 1840s, 1850s, and 1860s, focuses on the pharmacopoeias, medical dictionaries, textbooks, scientific journals, and lectures available to doctors and medical students of the time -- what physicians caring for soldiers in the war knew, and when they knew it. The book also looks at how medical conditions encountered by the Civil War surgeon were treated then, how those entities would be treated now, and when knowledge leading to current therapies became available"--Introd.
Author: Chris Hedges Publisher: Simon and Schuster ISBN: 1416583149 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 196
Book Description
Acclaimed New York Times journalist and author Chris Hedges offers a critical -- and fascinating -- lesson in the dangerous realities of our age: a stark look at the effects of war on combatants. Utterly lacking in rhetoric or dogma, this manual relies instead on bare fact, frank description, and a spare question-and-answer format. Hedges allows U.S. military documentation of the brutalizing physical and psychological consequences of combat to speak for itself. Hedges poses dozens of questions that young soldiers might ask about combat, and then answers them by quoting from medical and psychological studies. • What are my chances of being wounded or killed if we go to war? • What does it feel like to get shot? • What do artillery shells do to you? • What is the most painful way to get wounded? • Will I be afraid? • What could happen to me in a nuclear attack? • What does it feel like to kill someone? • Can I withstand torture? • What are the long-term consequences of combat stress? • What will happen to my body after I die? This profound and devastating portrayal of the horrors to which we subject our armed forces stands as a ringing indictment of the glorification of war and the concealment of its barbarity.
Author: Thomas Fleming Publisher: Da Capo Press ISBN: 0306822016 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 386
Book Description
By the time John Brown hung from the gallows for his crimes at Harper's Ferry, Northern abolitionists had made him a “holy martyr” in their campaign against Southern slave owners. This Northern hatred for Southerners long predated their objections to slavery. They were convinced that New England, whose spokesmen had begun the American Revolution, should have been the leader of the new nation. Instead, they had been displaced by Southern “slavocrats” like Thomas Jefferson. This malevolent envy exacerbated the South's greatest fear: a race war. Jefferson's cry, “We are truly to be pitied,” summed up their dread. For decades, extremists in both regions flung insults and threats, creating intractable enmities. By 1861, only a civil war that would kill a million men could save the Union.
Author: Jim Downs Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 0199911541 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 279
Book Description
Bondspeople who fled from slavery during and after the Civil War did not expect that their flight toward freedom would lead to sickness, disease, suffering, and death. But the war produced the largest biological crisis of the nineteenth century, and as historian Jim Downs reveals in this groundbreaking volume, it had deadly consequences for hundreds of thousands of freed people. In Sick from Freedom, Downs recovers the untold story of one of the bitterest ironies in American history--that the emancipation of the slaves, seen as one of the great turning points in U.S. history, had devastating consequences for innumerable freed people. Drawing on massive new research into the records of the Medical Division of the Freedmen's Bureau-a nascent national health system that cared for more than one million freed slaves-he shows how the collapse of the plantation economy released a plague of lethal diseases. With emancipation, African Americans seized the chance to move, migrating as never before. But in their journey to freedom, they also encountered yellow fever, smallpox, cholera, dysentery, malnutrition, and exposure. To address this crisis, the Medical Division hired more than 120 physicians, establishing some forty underfinanced and understaffed hospitals scattered throughout the South, largely in response to medical emergencies. Downs shows that the goal of the Medical Division was to promote a healthy workforce, an aim which often excluded a wide range of freedpeople, including women, the elderly, the physically disabled, and children. Downs concludes by tracing how the Reconstruction policy was then implemented in the American West, where it was disastrously applied to Native Americans. The widespread medical calamity sparked by emancipation is an overlooked episode of the Civil War and its aftermath, poignantly revealed in Sick from Freedom.
Author: Diane Miller Sommerville Publisher: UNC Press Books ISBN: 146964357X Category : History Languages : en Pages : 447
Book Description
More than 150 years after its end, we still struggle to understand the full extent of the human toll of the Civil War and the psychological crisis it created. In Aberration of Mind, Diane Miller Sommerville offers the first book-length treatment of suicide in the South during the Civil War era, giving us insight into both white and black communities, Confederate soldiers and their families, as well as the enslaved and newly freed. With a thorough examination of the dynamics of both racial and gendered dimensions of psychological distress, Sommerville reveals how the suffering experienced by Southerners living in a war zone generated trauma that, in extreme cases, led some Southerners to contemplate or act on suicidal thoughts. Sommerville recovers previously hidden stories of individuals exhibiting suicidal activity or aberrant psychological behavior she links to the war and its aftermath. This work adds crucial nuance to our understanding of how personal suffering shaped the way southerners viewed themselves in the Civil War era and underscores the full human costs of war.
Author: Christopher E. Loperfido
Author: Christopher Loperfido
Author: Drew Gilpin Faust
Author: Bonnie Brice Dorwart
Author: Chris Hedges
Author: Thomas Fleming
Author: Jim Downs
Author: Paul Eby Steiner
Author: Diane Miller Sommerville
Author: Charles G. Roland