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  • Intensely Human: The Health of the Black Soldier in the American Civil War
  • Sven Wilson
Intensely Human: The Health of the Black Soldier in the American Civil War. By Margaret Humphreys (Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008) 197 pp. $40.00

Though they faced battle less often than white soldiers, African-American soldiers in the U.S. Civil War died from disease at much higher rates than did whites. In this new volume, Humphreys explores the health of black soldiers and, not surprisingly, uncovers a story of racism, ignorance, neglect, and abuse. Her short work is a valuable companion to Shaffer's treatment of the health of black veterans following the war.1

Humphreys compiles an impressive array of archival evidence about the experiences of black soldiers. Particularly impressive is her use of detailed records from the Medical Committee of the U.S. Sanitary Commission. She also skillfully weaves into her study personal narratives, letters, and other anecdotes that supplement the military record, thereby humanizing her account of the black recruits, whose treatment often tended toward the impersonal and degrading.

A central focus of the book concerns how white conceptions of the black body negatively influenced the treatment of black recruits. As one Iowa physician charged with examining black recruits noted, the black man "has some capacity, physically considered, for military service, there cannot be a doubt; neither is there a doubt about the usefulness of the horse when subject to intelligent training" (147). Such attitudes led to [End Page 121] understaffed hospitals, poorly trained medical personnel, and low-quality care.

Humphreys' central claims are neither easily contestable nor controversial. However, they could have been buttressed by systematic analysis of the available microdata, which are missing, unfortunately, in Humphreys' analysis. For instance, the Center for Population Economics (CPE) at the University of Chicago has created detailed medical, military, and other records about 40,000 white recruits and 6,000 black recruits. Humphreys' epidemiological analysis is based solely on aggregate numbers and administrative documents from the Sanitary Commission. The widely used cpe data would have allowed more explicit comparisons of black and white experiences during the war and an exploration of the variables, including but not limited to race, that accounted for these differences.

Given that Humphreys is a physician and historian, it is odd that this monograph contains relatively little medical history that could help to place the conditions of white and black recruits in context. Although the medical staff could ensure rest, provide adequate diet, change dressings, and clean soiled beds (all of which would improve survival, but none of which requires much medical training), Humphreys underemphasizes the complete inability of even the best-trained staff to fight the infectious and parasitic diseases that killed many recruits. Indeed, soldiers were sometimes fortunate to have escaped the medical remedies of the day. That black soldiers suffered from racism and neglect is clear, but it is not certain how much of this neglect was due to poor medical training.

In spite of its methodological limitations, Humphrey's readable work casts considerable light on a neglected aspect of American history. Scholars interested in studying racial disparities in health will find this book a valuable starting point.

Sven Wilson
Brigham Young University

Footnotes

1. Donald Shaffer, After the Glory: The Struggles of Black Civil War Veterans (Lawrence, 2004).

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