Session Abstract

War unmade men.  It damaged them physically, emotionally and mentally.  It battered their bodies, their souls and their very identity.  It transformed them into greater or lesser men.  It never left their presence.  Our panel seeks to offer new explanations into how the advent of war, specifically the American Civil War, altered the human body.  Through extensive research into underutilized collections of primary sources, our panel will blend medical, social, cultural and gender history into a framework that will explore new and exciting dimensions into the Civil War historiography.  With Maris Vinovskis call in 1989 for social historians to get a better grasp on the everyday experience of citizens enduring the American Civil War, our panel seeks to answer that call through a new exploration of how the male body underwent transformation in the midst of war.  Katy Shively Meier's paper will explore 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. Brian Craig Miller will turn our attention to how southern society incorporated the damaged, limbless and defeated men who fought for the Confederacy, back into the fold. He will argue that veteran amputees found an honorable position in the post-war South--within families, workplaces, and politics. Megan Kate Nelson's paper will offer an analysis of the ways that prosthetics inventions, designs, and distribution and the men who wore artificial limbs were seen as emblematic of the nation’s technological prowess during and after the war. But they also called attention to the costs of such achievements, provoking anxieties about what was “real” what was counterfeit in American society.