Rehabilitating Bodies : : Health, History, and the American Civil War / / Lisa A. Long.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Penn Press eBook Package Complete Collection
• VerfasserIn: Long, Lisa A.,
• Place / Publishing House: Philadelphia : : University of Pennsylvania Press, , [2013]; ©2004
• Year of Publication: 2013
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (344 p.) :; 6 illus.

The American Civil War is one of the most documented, romanticized, and perennially reenacted events in American history. In Rehabilitating Bodies: Health, History, and the American Civil War, Lisa A. Long charts how its extreme carnage dictated the Civil War's development into a lasting trope that expresses not only altered social, economic, and national relationships but also an emergent self-consciousness. Looking to a wide range of literary, medical, and historical texts, she explores how they insist on the intimate relationship between the war and a variety of invisible wounds, illnesses, and infirmities that beset Americans throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and plague us still today.Long shows how efforts to narrate credibly the many and sometimes illusory sensations elicited by the Civil War led writers to the modern discourses of health and history, which are premised on the existence of a corporeal and often critical reality that practitioners cannot know fully yet believe in nevertheless. Professional thinkers and doers both literally and figuratively sought to rehabilitate-to reclothe, normalize, and stabilize-Civil War bodies and the stories that accounted for them.Taking a fresh look at the work of canonical war writers such as Louisa May Alcott and Stephen Crane while examining anew public records, journalism, and medical writing, Long brings the study of the Civil War into conversation with recent critical work on bodily ontology and epistemology and theories of narrative and history.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Introduction: Year That Trembled and Reel'd beneath Me -- 1 Doctors' Bodies: Dr. S. Weir Mitchell and Patient Malingering -- 2 Dead Bodies: Mourning Fictions and the Corporeity of Heaven -- 3 Sanitized Bodies: The United States Sanitary Commission and Soul Sickness -- 4 Experimental Bodies: African American Writers and the Rehabilitation of War Work -- 5 Soldiers' Bodies: Historical Fictions and the Sickness of Battle -- 6 Nursing Bodies: Civil War Women and Postbellum Regeneration -- 7 Historical Bodies: African American Scholars and the Discipline of History -- Epilogue: Conjuring Civil War Bodies -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index -- Acknowledgments