Books in Review

Bad Doctors: Military Justice Proceedings Against 622 Civil War Surgeons, by Thomas P. Lowery & Terry Reimer.  Appendices, index, 142 pp., 2010, National Museum of Civil War Medicine, www.civilwarmed.org, $11.99 softcover

  
Of the more than 12,000 surgeons who served in the war, most acted responsibly and discharged their medical duties with care. Most surgeons, but not all. A small number, 622, abused their positions so badly that they were tried in military court. Ms. Reimer’s book is a compre-hensive study of those surgeons who exhibited outrageous behavior ranging from drunkenness and promiscuity to arrogance, rape, theft, insolence, even insanity. Ms. Reimer relied on original documents, focusing on the courts-martial records of both Union and Confederate forces. Union medical records were more complete, but Confederate records were adequate to provide a basis for comparison. Ms. Reimer and her co-author also thoroughly researched War Department records and records of the Surgeon General, all during the Civil War, as well as the annals of the United States Service Magazine from 1861 through 1865. The result is a revealing, sometimes shocking, sometimes amusing portrait of surgeons behaving badly. The stress of a proportionately small group of of surgeons trying to care for such a great number of battlefield wounded took its toll, and the authors found that the rate of surgeons who deserted the camps was nearly the same as that of ordinary soldiers. In the final analysis, the authors conclude that the  reputation of all Civil War surgeons as “drunken sawbones” to be feared is not totally deserved and that, despite the miscreants, by and large the  surgeons exhibited the same flawed human behavior as other soldiers under the extreme duress of war. Ms. Reimer is the author of two other books on  Civil War medicine: One Vast Hospital: The Civil War Hospital Sites in Frederick, Maryland after Antietam, and Divided by Conflict, United by Compassion: The National Museum of Civil War Medicine.  Prior to her current position with the NMCWM, Ms. Reimer’s work includes more than 20 years of  experience in historical archaeology and research, specializing in 17th, 18th and 19th century American sites. She holds a B.A. in Anthropology  from the University of Maryland and did graduate work in anthropology and folklore studies at GeorgeWashington University. She has lived in Frederick  for more than 20 years.


American Oracle: The Civil War in the Civil Rights Era, by David W. Blight. Hardcover, illustrations, photos, notes, appendix, bibliography. 328 pp., 2011, Belknap Press of Harvard University, Cambridge, MA.

 In 1960, the South was still segregated, “racial equality” was little more than a phrase in sociology class — and the country was about to commemorate the Centennial of the Civil War. David W. Blight, renowned author and history professor at Yale, looks back 50 years to study how America was making sense of the War Between the States during a time of the greatest civil turmoil since that War. In this superb study, Blight highlights four dominant voices of the 1960s — author and historian Bruce Catton, novelist Robert Penn Warren, literary critic Edmund Wilson, African-American writer and activist James Baldwin —and explores their individual perspectives on why the War was fought and its everlasting yet ever-shifting impact. The author goes to the heart of the matter— the War was about ending slavery — and examines how that central, underlying issue was side-stepped time and again in favor of a more sentimental theme of reunification. In his own words, Blight describes his book as “a discussion of four Americans in search of their country's history.” That is a discussion, and a book, well worth having.