Intensely Human: The Health of the Black Soldier in the American Civil War, and: The Encyclopedia of Civil War Medicine (review)

Considering the amount of scholarship on the Civil War, historians have given relatively little attention to Civil War medicine. The lack of coverage does not correspond with its importance, however; of the approximately three million soldiers in the American Civil War, over 620,000 died, and hundreds of thousands of others only lived after suffering through wounds and disease. Most historians probably have little knowledge of modern medicine, let alone nineteenth-century medicine, and have thus been hesitant to explore fully its impact on the Civil War. Thus it is nice to see a couple of new works that focus on Civil War medicine.

Margaret Humphreys is well trained to provide insight into the medical history of the Civil War, with both a medical degree and a PhD in history from Harvard. Her subtitle, The Health of the Black Soldier in the American Civil War, suggests that she will tackle an even more challenging aspect of Civil War medicine, but this is a misnomer. Acknowledging that other historians have already "described the high mortality rates black soldiers suffered due to disease during the war, and chronicled their shabby treatment at the hands of the Union army," Humphreys states, "This narrative builds on the work of these and other scholars but uses new archival materials to deepen our understanding of northern physicians' view of the black body" (xi). Approximately half of this volume focuses on white doctors' views of black bodies and, unsurprisingly, finds that what "emerged from the war reinforced the general idea that black men were weaker than whites and more prone to disease" (56). Difficulty dealing with the concept of race, though, mars the analysis. For example, Humphreys does a poor job of disentangling the class and race elements in the account of a white officer (15–19). Her section on the biology of race is particularly disappointing, since she seems well positioned to discuss how group genetics plays a role in disease but is different from the social construction of race that most people use. She goes after Barbara Fields and the social construction of race for a page and then explains the difficulty modern medical researchers have with the concept of race, concluding that "they are being told that there is no way to scientifically define their study population. This flies in the face of common sense, and most just ignore it. People know whether they are black or white or Chinese, and how they self-report is what matters" (40, 43). How do people know what race they are, and is self-reporting scientific?

In the other half of Intensely Human, Humphreys writes, "the reasons for high black mortality rates, described briefly by earlier historians, are made clear … by close studies of particularly morbid environments in St. Louis, South Carolina, Louisiana, and Texas" (xi). Unfortunately, the author does little to expand our understanding of high mortality rates for African American soldiers. This may stem partly from her apparent unfamiliarity with some of the literature on the subject, such as Andrew L. Black's "In the Service of the United States: Comparative Mortality among African-American and White Troops in the Union Army," Journal of Negro History (1994). Historians have studied many of the toxic components that created high mortality rates for black soldiers. Former slaves, who constituted the majority of black soldiers, started the war "with the worst possible combination of backgrounds": they shared the white rural soldiers' susceptibility to infectious disease and the white urban soldiers' lowered resistance (8). Then two incorrect racist assumptions, that all blacks would have more resistance to tropical diseases and that they would be less effective at fighting than whites, led the Union military to disproportionately station black...