February 25, 2011

Margaret Humphreys (Duke University)

The (Likely) Failure of Confederate Medicine

This chapter, with the exciting working title of “Confederate Hospitals II” is drawn from my larger project on medicine in the American Civil War. I hope the chapter and its discussion in the seminar achieves several goals. First, I hope to foreground the role of statistics, and in this case vital statistics, in understanding the war. The war’s mortality statistics, far from being objective data, have been much disputed according to political slant, and the hospital statistics are likewise quite uncertain. Second, I would like to make a strong link between the effectiveness of medical care during the Civil War and the number of men available in the ranks for military combat. Medicine did matter in the Civil War, and there was a difference between good medical care and inadequate care. In prior chapters I have described the relative abundance of the northern hospital, and the assistance brought to the Union effort by the U.S. Sanitary Commission. In the chapter immediately preceding this one I describe the grandiose plans of CSA Surgeon General Samuel P. Moore to elevate the southern profession by means of a new journal, a new professional society, distributing books, certifying physicians, and setting up surgical review boards within hospitals. His persistent drive for professional reform is then contrasted to the situation “on the ground” where surgeons did not need elevating, they needed supplies and money. I will later in the book discuss the various reform impulses with which elite physicians entered the war, and how these goals interacted with the reality of military events.

Margaret Humphreys is the Josiah Charles Trent Professor in the History of Medicine at Duke University. She received her PhD in the History of Science (1983) and MD (1987) from Harvard University. She is the author of Yellow Fever and the South (Rutgers, 1992) and Malaria: Poverty, Race and Public Health in the United States (Johns Hopkins, 2001), books that explore the tropical disease environment of the American South, and its role in the national public health effort. In the spring of 2008 Dr. Humphreys published her newest book, Intensely Human: The Health of the Black Soldier in American Civil War. She teaches the history of medicine, public health, and biology at Duke University, where she also edits the Journal of the History of Medicine. Her current research project concerns the impact of the Civil War on American medicine.

Co-sponsored by the Triangle Institute for Security Studies