Intensely Human: The Health of the Black Soldier in the American Civil War (review)

In Intensely Human, Margaret Humphreys examines health disparities between black and white soldiers in the U.S. army during the Civil War. Historians have long known that black soldiers died at inordinately high rates from disease. Black men sustained an overall mortality rate of 18.5 percent compared with 13.5 percent among white soldiers. Comparison of deaths from combat to deaths from disease reveals what Margaret Humphreys and other scholars have found to be a “striking” imbalance (p. 10): combat claimed 4.5 percent of the white soldiers and 1.8 percent of black soldiers; among the white soldiers, 2.7 men died of disease for every 1 lost in combat, and yet for black soldiers, that ratio was 10:1.

Humphreys scrutinizes the medical theories and clinical practices of the Civil War era through the lens of present-day medical knowledge. Although much of her argument merely restates the widely recognized flaws of race-based medicine, she adds depth to this understanding from the underutilized records of the U.S. Sanitary Commission, a voluntary agency that ministered to the health needs of soldiers and civilians affected by the war. She draws special attention to Dr. Ira Russell, a native New Englander, who during 1863 and 1864 directed the army’s Benton Barracks Hospital in St. Louis, Missouri.

The hospital was part of a larger staging ground for mustering formerly enslaved men from rural plantations into military service. In these circumstances, Russell faced a rampage of death from communicable diseases to which the men had had no prior exposure. The grisly circumstances, however, also presented Russell with an opportunity for scientific inquiry. He performed more than eight hundred autopsies on deceased black soldiers, describing in detail the weight and condition of vital organs and categorizing each man by fractional degrees of “whiteness”—determined, no doubt, by his discerning eye rather than by the direct testimony of the man (p. 101). Humphreys notes the “seeming paradox” between Russell’s empathy for the men while they lived and his “willingness to desecrate their corpses after death” (p. 100).

Mid-nineteenth-century practitioners knew that rural populations were susceptible to measles, smallpox, and various respiratory problems when exposed to crowded conditions. They also understood that vaccination mitigated smallpox; yet Humphreys’s account of the vaccination techniques employed at Benton Barracks Hospital leaves little doubt that the presumed antidote did more harm than good. When military officials calculated that the black men recruited in Missouri might best serve the national cause in the lowlands of Louisiana, they demonstrated how the seed of a partial truth—that persons of African ancestry could withstand malarial climates—might yield a harvest of suffering. The ill-fated 65th U.S. Colored Infantry bore the brunt of this miscalculation, losing 742 of its 1,707 enlisted men to death, none from combat. In another noteworthy debacle, wherein scurvy ravaged the black troops who were serving in Texas during the summer of 1865, the mere provision of vegetables in the men’s rations might have mitigated the death toll. “By the standards and knowledge of the time,” she concludes, “the deaths were entirely preventable” (p. 140).

A number of errors and stylistic miscues detract from the work. The site of one of the first battles in which black soldiers participated was Port Hudson, not Port Arthur, Louisiana (p. 5). The widely circulated newspaper published in New York was the Weekly Anglo-African, not the Weekly Afro-American or the African American Weekly (p. 184, n. 12; p. 186, n. 50). Data are plural, not singular (pp. 82, 83).

On balance, these flaws are minor. Intensely Human offers something of value to scholars of the history of medicine, of the Civil War, and of the insidious impact of racial ideology on the policies and practices that...