Soldier, Surgeon, Scholar: The Memoirs of William Henry Corbusier, 1844-1930 (review)

212Southwestern Historical QuarterlyOctober vincing Southerners that any evils remaining in the system stemmed from the activities of a small group of itinerant traders rather than respectable dealers. "A class of evil slave traders," Gudmestad concludes, "could be publicly and ritually condemned for wreaking havoc in the lives of slaves so that ordinary slaveholders would feel no remorse for engaging in essentially the same activities" (p. 205). Even this transformation, however, could not totally eradicate the taint attached to slave traders, regardless of the scale of their business. When Isaac Franklin died in 1846 as one of the wealthiest men in the South, not a single newspaper account of his life and death mentioned his profession. Readers of die Southwestern Historical Quarterly may be disappointed to find that this study has little or nothing on slave traders in Texas, especially since dealers operated in Galveston and Houston throughout the late antebellum years. However, since most Texans of that day were Southerners who grew up in the culture of the older slave states, it may be assumed that they shared the prevalent attitudes toward men who profited from the sale of bondsmen. Overall, A Troublesome Commerce does not fundamentally change the well-known story of how slave traders served as scapegoats, but it adds depth to our understanding of one important way Southerners coped with the moral burdens of slavery. University ofNorth TexasRandolph B. Campbell Soldier, Surgeon, Scholar: The Memoirs of William Henry Corbusier, 1844—1930. Edited by Robert Wooster. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2003. Pp. xx+234. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, index. ISBN 0-8061-3459-2. $29.95, cloth.) The generation of individuals who saw both the Civil War and the Second Industrial Revolution may have witnessed more change than any other in human history. Robert Wooster's edited, annotated Soldier, Surgeon, Scholar: The Memoirs of William Henry Corbusier, 1844-1930 presents an eyewitness account of America's sometimes painful emergence from a devastating Civil War to become a colonial world power. Corbusier's stream-of-consciousness writing takes the reader with him on his travels around the United States during his service in the United States Army. Corbusier's writing style reveals a man of few words. He writes almost wistfully about his youth and treats the reader to many details about everyday life growing up in New York City, on a farm in Nyack, New York, and in the golden fields of California. His Civil War experiences introduced him to the army that became his life. It is interesting to observe the parallel evolutions of Corbusier and the nation. During the Civil War, when Corbusier began his army service, the germ theory of disease had not yet been developed. By the time he left the service thirty -nine years later, not only were the causes of diseases much better understood, but many new techniques for treating illnesses had been put into practice. Corbusier held many of the beliefs and prejudices common among mainstream whites during this period and believed that his purpose was to uplift the Indians 2??8Book Reviews213 and Filipinos he encountered in the course of his travels. While his knowledge of medicine and the world around him grew, so did the United States. When he entered the U.S. Army the frontier was still a very real part of American life; by the time Corbusier retired, the United States had become an urban, industrialized , world power. Wooster's editing and annotation are thorough and informative. One minor criticism is the lack of maps. There are only two maps in Soldier, Surgeon, Scholar, and at times it is difficult to follow Corbusier's many moves around the country. Soldier, Surgeon, Scholar should be read and compared to its companion volume by Fanny Dunbar Corbusier, William Henry Corbusier's wife of forty-eight years (see Fanny Dunbar Corbusier: Recollections ofHerArmy Life, 1869—1908, ed. by Patricia Y. Stallard, Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2003). Both works are valuable contributions to American, and especially Western, history of the second half of nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The combination of excellent scholarship , editing, and annotation makes these primary documents readily available to both scholars and the general public...