Rehabilitating Bodies: Health, History, and the American Civil War (review)

Bodies, in this book about the meaning of the American Civil War, are both mutable, physical things and figures of imagination. Lisa Long looks at different ways in which the war implicated bodies—from battlefield wounds to postwar trauma—in order to answer the question "why is the Civil War so important to us still?" (p. 15). The result is an interesting, often fascinating, sometimes perplexing meditation on links between bodies and persons, war experience and history. In Long's view, the war has become the central trope of our national imagination, something that we literally wish to relive—to "rehabilitate," as her title has it. The Civil War combines the irreducibly individual with the expansively public. Personal wounds were inflicted and suffered in the name of abstractions: nation, home, freedom. We are driven as a nation, Long argues, to understand this war as a juncture of mortal bodies and a deathless wish to be whole.

In tracing the overlap between lived experience and national imagination, Long takes up topics of wide interest to other scholars now working on the Civil War, including race (and especially the physical "blackness" of African Americans), trauma, memory, and storytelling. For historians of medicine, the book features literary figures in medical care, from S. Weir Mitchell to Louisa May Alcott and Walt Whitman. This is not a study that aims to say anything new about the particulars of battlefield surgery or the politics of the U.S. Sanitary Commission—but it has a great deal to suggest about how American culture has cherished this prolonged moment of national disruption and personal sacrifice. It is Long's valuable insight that the bodies of participants in the war itself are linked through time to the bodies of those of us who study, act, and imagine our way into this most primitive and yet "modern" event of the American nineteenth century.

This said, the book has some omissions and silences that will puzzle many historians of the war. For instance, few would deny that Weir Mitchell's war writings, which encompass the fictional as well as the medical, are compelling. But Long might have pushed her interpretation further to address the ways in which Mitchell was sui generis. In both the volume and perspective of his work, Mitchell was far from representative of the thousands of physicians who also wrote about the war in more colloquial, immediate ways. Thinking more fully about how removed Mitchell was from mainstream medical practitioners of the mid-century would have permitted Long a sharper view of what Mitchell did not see as well as what he did.

Similarly, two other social dimensions of the war seem underplayed here. One is gender, which of course Long acknowledges, but only barely. That soldiers were male and that masculine values were everywhere used to inspire, condemn, and remember would seem a portal on the war's historical meaning worth more exploration. The same can be said for another nineteenth-century American passion: sectional or regional identity, which persists to this day, especially in the South. Long has almost nothing to say about how southerners—black and white—have memorialized the war in ways different from other Americans. And yet Lost Cause literature—the upsurge of writing that to this day sentimentalizes the defeated Confederacy as the essence of "the South"—has given a particularly sharp and durable texture to the physical loss and "rehabilitation" that is this book's subject.