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147 CONCLUSION Self-Care beyond 1862 On May 22, 1862, New York artillerist George Perkins lay in camp listening to the thuds of hail “as big as marbles and some as big as English walnuts.” Though his “little tent stood the storm well,” the private was sodden and, over the course of the night, developed a raging fever. The next morning, he dropped out of his battery to wander the bewildering , washed-out roads of the Virginia Peninsula. That evening he fell in with some Michiganites, who took refuge in a barn. All night they heard rats scampering across the planks, stealing kernels of corn. A few days later, still sick and now itching with a mysterious rash, Perkins was back with his battery, a shade of his former self. On May 27, he scribbled in his diary, “Rained all last night and part of the day. . . . Sick with no care.” On May 29, “Cloudy and rainy. Sick all the time.” And finally, on June 4, “Drizzly and rainy all day. Longed very much for home.”1 The rain, the marching, and the physical pain of soldiering had grown almost unbearable. Perkins’s diary was echoed by hundreds of thousands of men in 1862 Virginia, most of whom saw relatively little of the horror and exhilaration of combat that year. They all, however, became fast experts in enduring the environmental misery of soldiering. Like Perkins, many of the men attempted to fasten their tents against exposure, intervene in their camp terrain, gather food and fresh water, straggle for reprieve, or practice other self-care techniques. They banded together in camp or on the march, or slipped quietly into barns, churches, or private homes, hoping to avoid the unfamiliar and inadequate army medical systems. The majority of the men still succumbed to illness or melancholy at some point during 1862, but actively adapting to their environments at least gave them a fighting chance to stay alive and mentally resilient. 148 / Conclusion On the one hand, self-care’s emphasis on disease prevention, and its attention to boiling water, eradicating insects, and tempering exposure to filth anticipated a percolating medical revolution that would culminate in germ theory and vector-borne illness theory in the 1870s and 1880s. On the other hand, many of these folk cures and practices had been popular with the lower classes for decades, some even millennia. It was, however, the Civil War that provided the opportunity for average Americans to proliferate knowledge about health and nature and innovate with an unprecedented urgency. As the soldiers became seasoned to the environment of war, they surpassed those at home in the complexity of their understandings of how nature interacted with their bodies and mental states. It remains to be seen if this divergence changed the way veterans reintegrated into society and accepted or rejected postwar developments in environmental management, science, and medicine. Yet some aspects of self-care resulted in immediate estrangement between soldiers and their commanding officers and also between soldiers and civilians. The democratic spirit underlying self-care would only be tolerated to the degree that it did not appear to interfere with military operations and the progress of campaigns. Soldiers in 1862 exceeded those limits, drawing ridicule for their straggling, their indulgence in non-regulation food and supplies, and their apparent disregard for or perhaps ignorance of army protocols. To some, common soldiers appeared to have failed to adapt to military life. But from their own perspectives, the men had weathered immense challenges unfathomable to and often unacknowledged by outsiders. The soldier community encouraged and celebrated each other’s self-care accomplishments as rungs on the ladder to coveted veteran status. The process by which Confederates and Federals adapted to their environments in 1862 had proved remarkably similar. While Virginians occasionally navigated a different set of circumstances in that they were close to home and could straggle more easily to their families, all soldiers perceived and adapted to diverse environments in essentially identical ways. The question is to what extent the similarities between troops had to do with the year of the case study, before army infrastructures were fully developed and both sides were still struggling to support their armies in the field. In 1862 and beyond, the Union developed the more complex medical bureaucracy than the Confederacy, involving the U.S. Sanitary Commission and Jonathan Letterman’s efficient system of ambulance evacuation, and enjoyed a more robust reserve of supplies, especially chemically manufactured medicines.2 Further...

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