Life and Limb: Perspectives on the American Civil War ed. by David Seed, Stephen C. Kenny, Chris Williams (review)

In “The Real War Will Never Get in the Books,” one of the most memorable and oft-quoted parts of Specimen Days (1882), Walt Whitman argued that the “marrow of tragedy concentrated in those Army hospitals” remained the Civil War’s “untold and unwritten history.” “Think how much, and of importance . . . has already been—buried in the grave, in eternal darkness,” he wrote. Our paltry inheritance of 1861 to 1865 was “a few stray glimpses” of a “many-threaded drama.”

Life and Limb collects glimpses of the human suffering prompted by the war; each of these testifies eloquently to the efforts of surgeons and nurses, battlefield photographers and prosthetic manufacturers, veterans and writers (many of them well-known, but others less renowned) to make meaning of the misery all around them. A Union assistant surgeon describes the breathless, improvised aftermath of Bull Run, and a New York adjutant pocked by enemy lead narrates his evacuation from the battlefield at Cold Harbor. Nurses recall the woes of hospital wards, then marvel, with perhaps equal parts satisfaction and distress, at their newfound fortitude: “I am simply eyes, ears, hands, and feet,” Sarah Emma Edmonds concedes (34). “It seems strange,” the African American nurse Susie King Taylor comments, “how our aversion to seeing suffering is overcome in war—how we are able to see the most sickening sights . . . without a shudder” (37). Reports are included of both the insect-infested excuse for a field hospital at Andersonville and Mathew Brady’s New York exhibition of Antietam images. Advertisements and testimonials for artificial limbs are presented, and both post-battle and postwar narratives, several from the pen of Ambrose Bierce, are sampled. Finally, from an insert printed on glossy paper, double amputees stare at us hauntingly, both before and after they are fitted with state-of-the-art arms or legs.

Several succinct contributions from modern scholars are modestly interspersed among the sources, ensuring that the voices of Civil War Americans predominate. Like the sources, each essay invites us to interrogate the ways we have gazed at the war and its legacies of human destruction. Robert Leigh Davis reviews Walt Whitman’s Civil War prose, highlighting both its “ethics of intimate attention” and its instructive cadence—a “dilatory pace of hesitating, pausing, stepping aide” (43, 45). Susan-Mary Grant’s splendid essay reminds us that our reflexive laments for the supposedly primitive state of battlefield medicine can obstruct our view of some of the war’s extraordinary surgical coups. Nonetheless, Grant is keenly aware of the war’s “appalling” side; demonstrating the promise of neglected sources, she issues an eloquent call for “a more inclusive narrative, one that brings together the medical and the martial, the soldier and the surgeon” (91–92). Mick Gidley considers the work of Civil War photography, from the battlefield carnage captured on wet plates to the less studied images of maimed and mangled veterans collected that the new Army Medical Museum in Washington, D.C., collected during the war. Finally, Dillon Jackson Carroll renders a sketch of the Maine artillerist Napoleon Perkins, who, his new bride and newly fitted prosthetic limb notwithstanding, perhaps never made sense of the loss of his leg.

While scholars will no doubt be familiar with many of the materials it excerpts, both the richness and the range of this welcome volume mark it an as ideal addition to undergraduate syllabi. It is likewise ideal for classroom adoption because the editors invite readers to draw their own conclusions—to reach for an interpretation that looks to the war not merely as a military event but as human experience. If Seed, Kenny, and Williams hazard few answers of their own, at least they are asking the right questions. “As distant witnesses to the war and its victims, readers have to work hard not to wallow in the appalling details of...