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TWO. Living with Disability: Jim Tanner Reinvents Himself
- University of Georgia Press
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CHAPTER TWO Living with Disability Jim Tanner Reinvents Himself There have always been disabled people in the United States, of course, and during the nineteenth century industrialization and the development of railroads led to a dramatic increase in the number of men disabled in work-related accidents. But the Civil War would lead not only to over six hundred thousand deaths but to the disabling of hundreds of thousands of other men by sickness, injuries, and a combination of poor diet, exposure to harsh weather, and grinding toil. Disabled soldiers would become a powerful symbol of the costs of war. Some would wear their empty pinned sleeves as badges of honor. Some, worn down by their injuries, resorted to begging, while others simply faded back into their families and communities . Jim Tanner belonged to this massive group of men ruined by war, but he was also one of many who fought back. His successful battle to overcome his grievous injuries certainly reveals a set of strengths particular to him, but it also reflects something about the values and opportunities of the era. The fame and fortune that would eventually come to Jim Tanner were impossible to imagine as he lay in a filthy field hospital in Virginia, hovering between life and death, experiencing the worst of the limited medical knowledge of the time. The war changed Tanner, as it changed every man who experienced its sharp end. It turned him into a different person physically, tottering on artificial legs and suffering constant pain. But the physical limitations wrought by the war would also lead him to embark on a determined, often painful course of self-improvement and self-reliance. A Nervy Little Cuss For many years Tanner had no idea who had cut off his legs a few inches below the knee. He knew the names of the five men who had carried him from the field, but as he stated on more than one occasion, he did not know 20 chapter two the name of the surgeon who had slashed his mangled feet off above the ankle, tossed his bloody instruments into a saddlebag, and galloped away from the advancing Rebels. Twenty-eight years after the war, however, after Tanner gave a public lecture in the small Michigan city of Hillsdale, a member of the audience asked, “Where and how did you lose your legs?” As he had on countless occasions,Tanner described the scene but also mentioned the mystery of the surgeon’s identity. “I performed the operation,” a man in the audience abruptly declared. He was a much-loved local doctor named Robert A. Everett who had lived in the town since before the war. When Everett asked if he could take a look at the stumps, the Corporal let the doctor unstrap his prosthetics. After a “thorough examination,” Dr. Everett declared that he remembered the case clearly. At the time he was the twenty-two-year-old assistant surgeon of the Fifth Michigan. He had sliced off Tanner’s feet “very much in haste,” then, leaving him “under the influence of chloroform[,] rolled up [his] surgical instruments and got out of the way of the enemy.” Not surprisingly, he had not recorded Tanner’s name, company, or regiment; in his postbattle report, he had simply labeled the patient “unknown.” Tanner and Everett became friends and later visited the site of the field hospital together. It is almost inconceivable to modern readers that a twenty-two-yearold —just four years older than Tanner—would be put in Everett’s position , but such was the state of medical education and military medicine in the 1860s. Everett was, in fact, better trained and more experienced than many. He had received a two-year md degree from the state university and practiced medicine with his father for two years before joining the army; he had also been in combat prior to Second Bull Run, as the Fifth had seen hard fighting during the Seven Days Battles. Like Everett, most doctors were trained by other physicians or by taking a few semesters of classes at one of the medical schools that had begun appearing earlier in the century. There were no such things as internships or residencies, and although some newly certified doctors may have dissected a dead body, most would merely have observed a professor cutting up a cadaver in a lecture hall. The doctors charged with caring for the sick and wounded were...