The Wounded River: Civil War Letters of John Vance Lauderdale, M.D. (review)

316 BOOK REVIEWS NOTES 1. "Because the body is usually considered a natural given, this kind of history is very often a legitimation of the history of medicine. It tends to make the healer into a timeless figure, to naturalize the 'doctor' along with the body." Barbara Duden, The Woman Beneath the Skin: A Doctor's Patients in Eighteenth-Century Germany (Cambridge : Harvard University Press, 1991), 5. 2. Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar, Laboratory Life: TL· Construction of Scientific Facts (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986); Emily Martin, The Woman in the Body: A Cultural Analysis of Reproduction (Boston: Beacon Press, 1987); Marilyn Strathern, Reproducing tL· Future: Anthropology, Kinship and tL· New Reproductive Technologies (New York: Routledge, 1992). Peter Josyph, editor, The Wounded River: Civil War Letters of John Vance Lauderdale, M.D. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1993. xii + 241 pp. Clothbound, $29.95. John Vance Lauderdale was an ordinary man of the mid-nineteenth century. He accomplished, however, one extraordinary deed, thanks to discipline, a certain talent, and the wish to communicate—he wrote letters almost daily to his sister throughout his experience on the hospital river boat, D. A. January, during the Civil War. Lauderdale was a civilian contract surgeon, a staff physician on the army ship that had been outfitted and supplied by the United States Sanitation Conunission in 1862. Having just graduated from the Medical College of New York, he felt fortunate to find this job, which paid well and which offered excellent experience in surgery for the youthful doctor. Peter Josyph presents a thoughtful biography of Lauderdale, which brings the reader well prepared to the letters themselves. The letters reside in the Western American Division of Yale University's Beincke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Lauderdale wrote with a naive straightforwardness and a genuine wish to share his travels with his sister. "I have seen so many things and done so much that I hardly know where to begin my narration of events and scenes I have witnessed...." (p. 55), he writes at the beginning of one letter. His appreciation of the human cost of war is a theme that gathers force as the letters progress, and we see Lauderdale gaining maturity in his faithful recital of each day's events. His hospital ship plied the great western rivers bringing the wounded from battlefields to general hospitals. "I have just finished my round of visiting sick," he wrote in April 1862. Book Reviews 317 Have administered medicines to 100 during the last two hours. I take my basket of medicines and go from cot to cot and bunk to bunk to give each one something that will do him some good.... We have lost two to day, one of them was one of the Secesh [a Confederate soldier]. He died from his injuries & want of proper care. The Medical director sent an order by some men to have him buried & they took him off with the others of our men & buried them up the hill near the battle ground. There is no ceremony attending the burial of dead on the battle field. They dig trenches as wide as the length of a man, and from ten to twenty feet in length, and place the bodies in, as many as they can get, and cover them up. There is scarce a stake or a flat board left nearby, to mark the name of the body. In a few places I would see a name cut on a flat piece of wood or marked with a pencil___(p. 58) [All quoted material preserves Lauderdale's distinctive style, punctuation and spelling.] Following the Battle of Pittsburgh Landing (Shiloh), the D.A. January was pressed into service, crowding her decks and cabins with wounded and dying men who were to be transported up the Mississippi River to hospitals in the North. "Poor broken down frames of men, some of them were," Lauderdale writes to his sister. Some of them must die sooner or later. The exposure of camp life, arduous labor, broken rest, picket duty, excitement of war and the overcoming of that inborn horror of sheding a brotherhood (that is too tame an expression), I should say the firing...