An International Dialogue on Bodies during the U.S. Civil War

The U.S. Military Medical Department approached the health crisis of the Civil War with surprising sluggishness, given its recent experience in the Mexican-American War, in which disease had caused 80% of mortalities. A major factor in the delay of military medical advancement was the general confusion about disease causation prevalent at the time. Some doctors maintained belief in Galenic bodily humors, while others were increasingly drawn to environmental explanations of disease. Indeed, publications by the U.S. Sanitary Commission registered more confusion about even simple diseases, such as scurvy, in 1865 than they did in 1861. Meanwhile, European medicine was undergoing a revolution in the mid-nineteenth century. Certain foreign scientists cast a keen eye upon the American Civil War in hopes of better understanding disease causation. For instance, Charles Darwin contacted the U.S. Sanitary Commission in 1861 to procure statistical evidence on soldier and sailor bodies. Thus, this paper explores the dialogue between European scientists and American medical practitioners during the Civil War to better comprehend what the U.S. Civil War taught the world about the human body’s relationship to disease.