Mending Broken Soldiers: The Union and Confederate Programs to Supply Artificial Limbs by Guy R. Hasegawa (review)

Mending Broken Soldiers joins a growing number of scholarly works that examine the experiences of Civil War amputees and the government and civilian programs that attempted to provide them with artificial limbs. This is a top-down study; author Guy Hasegawa is most interested in determining the extent and impact of, as well as the commonalities and differences between, Union and Confederate limb production and distribution efforts. His sources, therefore, are predominantly government documents, the little-known records of the Confederate Association for the Relief of Maimed Soldiers (ARMS), and the publications of prosthetics manufacturers. He situates his study within the trajectory of Americans’ commitment to caring for and rehabilitating the nation’s military men, arguing that in 1861 there were no templates for such programs. Hasegawa’s points regarding the success of the Union program and the struggles of Confederate administrators will likely not surprise Civil War historians; but the hard data he produces (most effectively presented in the appendixes) regarding prosthetics manufacturers and the numbers of amputees who obtained their products is enlightening and useful to anyone studying veterans or the broader topic of “embodied” warfare.

Hasegawa begins his concise study (at eighty pages of text, it is a very slim volume) with an overview of wartime developments in weaponry and surgery that increased the demand for artificial limbs between 1861 and 1865. He then moves on to describe prosthetics and the manufacturers who produced them, arguing that before and during the war, the prosthetics industry was distinguished by “mechanical ingenuity, bitter rivalry, and shrewd business positioning” (7). Continuing his focus on manufacturers, by the second chapter the energetic and aggressive Benjamin Franklin Palmer becomes the star of the show, fanatically defending his own patents and suing other manufacturers (many of whom he trained) for infringement. Hasegawa then turns his focus to the Union’s programs to supply war amputees with artificial limbs, describing the committees convened by the surgeon general to approve arms and legs for distribution, and the successive acts of legislation that funded their work. A fascinating argument emerges here, that as the Union program continued to grow and expand opportunities for veteran amputees to secure prosthetics, these developments also created opportunities for manufacturers to misbehave, overcharging for their limbs or providing faulty products. Hasegawa ultimately determines that between 1862 and 1867, Union veteran amputees purchased 6,614 artificial arms and legs, using funds provided by the federal government. The program was successful due to the “organized and dedicated administrators within the medical department,” generous funding on the part of Congress, and a “growing limbs industry that was eager for additional business.” It was a “remarkable logistical accomplishment and an important milestone in the government’s commitment to care for its wounded soldiers and sailors” (45).

The Confederacy’s efforts to provide limbs for its veterans were less effective. Although the Confederate Congress discussed options in 1863, they took no action, and it fell to civilians to create ARMS in 1864. William Allen Carrington, the medical director for Richmond’s hospitals and the chief administrator for all hospitals in Virginia, takes center stage here. Over the course of two years, Carrington constantly struggled to locate southern limb manufacturers and raise money from Confederate citizens to purchase their wares. Artificial limb producers were scarce in the South, and their wartime work was hampered by the dearth of skilled workers (a result of the Confederate conscription acts), shortages of vital materials due to the Union blockade, and skyrocketing inflation. To address these issues, Carrington and other ARMS volunteers advocated draft exemptions for mechanics, sold cotton to England in order to purchase materials there, and turned to state governments for donations, among other strategies. Ultimately, ARMS issued 768 orders for artificial legs, and 430 were furnished. Hasegawa argues that the “good intentions and sacrifices that sustained ARMS could not overcome a wartime environment that was anything...