Defeated Flesh: Medicine, Welfare, and Warfare in the Making of Modern France (review)

Bertrand Taithe. Defeated Flesh: Medicine, Welfare, and Warfare in the Making of Modern France. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999. xii + 292 pp. Ill. $77.00 (cloth, 0-7245-0048-9), $27.95 (paperbound, 0-7245-0049-7).

This broadly contextualized study of militarization and medicalization during the Franco-Prussian War takes its cue from Pierre Nora's work on memory. While military and civilian medical activities during 1870-71 provide a pivot for Defeated Flesh, the narrative glances back into the state of French army medicine during the Second Empire and looks forward to the fate of injured war veterans on the eve of the Great War. In this, the book stands apart both from an older genre of military history concerned mainly with tactics or the histories of single regiments, battles, or ships, and from histories of medicine that seek to separate the military from the civil. Bertrand Taithe selects "war stories" as an organizational trope but is concretely interested in how events are remembered and retold, and in what the critical reading of print images, paintings, monuments, and other war memorabilia can tell us of war and its effects on the French psyche.

The effects of the events of 1870 on the practice of medicine were both dramatic and immediate. Paris became a giant hospital. Baron Hippolyte Larrey, head of the army medical service and son of Napoleon's famous surgeon Dominique Larrey, became the man in the breach. Guided by a tourist map from the city's 1867 Universal Exposition, he divided Paris into nine sectors. In managing the medical necessities of the wounded and a heterodox fighting force of gardes nationaux, militiamen, semiprofessional soldiers, and gardes mobiles, he faced the challenge of establishing medical jurisdictions between military and civil authorities and organizing ambulance services. Complicating his task was the fact that many of the conscript gardes mobiles spoke only their native Breton, and, unlike army regulars, only a few had been vaccinated for smallpox. Typhus and typhoid, still common enough in times of peace, flared during the war; starvation was a major problem, and smallpox ran rampant among the gardes mobiles and war refugees. Rightly cautious of the era's vital statistics, Taithe estimates a threefold increase in both disease-related deaths and infant mortality during the siege. While the book frequently juxtaposes the actions and recollections of military medical men--whose craft demanded attention to the identification of malingerers and the rapid repair and rehabilitation of the injured--with the more expectant agenda of civilian medicine, a prudent narrative examines how these two styles of medicine diverged and converged as the municipality, the army, civilian medical practitioners, and the government negotiated spheres of influence and action.

The book's chapters, many with illustrations and tables, range over topics such as the Red Cross and humanitarianism, food rationing and municipal soup kitchens, the state and medicine, and war surgery and its metaphors. Of the Commune and its medical and educational legacy, Taithe notes that while only two doctors joined the Commune, the Communards aided the secularization of the hospital through their advocacy of professional nursing. On balance, he finds that an emphasis on decentralization and state-led interventionism made the Commune unattractive to the majority of physicians.

With so many topics treated seriatim, at times the argument and its ostensible grounding in the events and retelling of the Franco-Prussian War fade from view. Taithe portrays the French as recoding excessive drinking and syphilis as causes of the events of 1870-71--yet many other factors, from hereditarian ideas to French failures in science, industry, and education, were also identified during the Third Republic as leading to the defeat. To evaluate whether this recoding of long-studied problems was a central or peripheral exercise in relation to the memory of this war, more is needed to map the discursive functions...