Most histories of wounded Civil War veterans construe them as feminized men whose manhood has suffered due to their inability to provide for and raise families or engage in business. Wounded for Life complicates this picture by examining how seven veterans—six soldiers and one physician—coped with their changed bodies in their postwar lives.
Through these intimate stories, author Robert D. Hicks looks at the veteran’s body as shaped by the trauma of the battlefield and hospital and the construction of a postwar identity in relation to that trauma. Through his research, he reveals the changing social circumstances of the late 19th and early 20th centuries as they impacted the traumatized veteran’s body.
This engaging book is equal parts Civil War history, disability and gender history, and the history of the body that discloses the impact of war on a wounded warrior.
Table of Content
Acknowledgments
1. Listening to Another’s Wound
2. Silas Weir Mitchell (1829–1914)
3. Electric Agony
4. Henry Adolph Kircher (1841–1908)
5. Richard Downey Dunphy (1841?–1904)
6. Prestley Dorsey/Dawson (1842?–1907)
7. John Shields (1839–1923)
8. Thomas R. Hawkins (1840–1870)
9. Henry Shippen Huidekoper (1839–1918)
10. The Wind of Their Place and Time
Appendix A: Pension Laws
Appendix B: Veterans’ Health Questionnaire
Notes
Bibliography
Index
About the author
Robert D. Hicks, Ph D, is author of Civil War Medicine: A Surgeon’s Experience and an independent scholar of the history of science and medicine. He was formerly a Senior Consulting Scholar and William Maul Measey Chair for the History of Medicine at the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, and for over a decade, he served as Director of the Mütter Museum and Historical Medical Library at the college. He holds a doctorate in history from the University of Exeter, United Kingdom, and degrees in anthropology and archaeology from the University of Arizona.
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