“What Means This Carnage?”: Civil War Soldiers’ Bodies, Recuperative Projects, and the Army Medical Museum

Abstract

This essay is about bodies in war and a bone collection. In 1862 during the American Civil War, the US War Department established the Army Medical Museum with the mandate to collect morbid anatomy from the battlefield. It was a dramatic response to the existential crisis posed by wounded and dead Union soldiers. Its creation engaged two differing mid-19thc. epistemological orientations devoted to the care of the human body: the emerging field of medical science and antebellum mourning rituals. Treating the museum as an object of material culture, I track its visual strategies to grapple with war’s carnage and national dissolution.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

Research for this study was generously supported by a Smithsonian Senior Fellowship at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, DC, and I am especially grateful to Eleanor Harvey and my cohort of Fellows for their inspiration and encouragement during my time there. Michael Rhodes graciously shared his deep knowledge of the history of the Army Medical Museum, and the archivists at the National Museum of Health and Medicine made access to materials in their collection such an easy matter. An NEH Summer Fellowship on the visual culture of the American Civil War first seeded the ideas for this topic, and I greatly benefited from the mentorship of Sarah Burns. I also benefited from astute feedback of colleagues during presentations of this work at an Association of Historians of American Art conference and at a Harvard Art Museums symposium. Special thanks go to Maura Lyons and Elizabeth Lee, whose insights and thought-provoking discussions helped bring this work to completion, and to Christy Anderson and The Art Bulletin’s anonymous readers for their invaluable queries and comments.

1 “My God! What is all this for?,” 1861, Confederate Song Sheets, Slip Ballads, and Poetical Broadsides Collection, Wolf C116, Library Company of Philadelphia. Drew Gilpin Faust briefly discusses this song sheet in This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008), 177.

2 Specifically, the Battle of Fort Donelson in February and the Battle of Shiloh in April. See “Statistics on the Civil War and Medicine,” ehistory, Ohio State University, https://ehistory.osu.edu/exhibitions/cwsurgeon/cwsurgeon/statistics.

3 Circular No. 2, May 21, 1862, Records of the Office of the Surgeon General, Issuances and reports, entry 63, box 1, RG 112, National Archives, Washington, DC.

4 Mary Clemmer Ames, Ten Years in Washington: Life and Scenes in the National Capital, as a Woman Sees Them (Hartford, CT: A. D. Worthington, 1874), 475. J. J. Woodward expressed a similar sentiment in “The Army Medical Museum at Washington,” Lippincott’s Magazine of Popular Literature and Science 7 (March 1871): 233–42 (242). For the move to Ford’s Theatre, see Deed to Ford’s Theatre, 1866–78, Curatorial Records, OHA 10, Otis Historical Archives, National Museum of Health and Medicine (hereafter cited as NMHM), Silver Spring, MD, as well as Brian Anderson, Images of America: Ford’s Theatre (Charleston, SC: Arcadia, 2014).

5 While key studies address the memorializing function of the museum, they are guided more by its scientific and medical efforts. See, for example, Amanda E. Bevers, “To Bind Up the Nation’s Wounds: The Army Medical Museum and the Development of American Medical Science, 1862–1913,” (PhD diss., UC San Diego, 2015); Shauna Devine, Learning from the Wounded: The Civil War and the Rise of American Medical Science (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014), 13–52; Michael G. Rhode and James T. H. Connor, “‘A Repository for Bottled Monsters and Medical Curiosities’: The Evolution of the Army Medical Museum,” in Defining Memory: Local Museums and the Construction of History in America’s Changing Communities, ed. Amy K. Levin (Lanham, MD: AltaMira, 2007); Robert S. Henry, The Armed Forces Institute of Pathology: Its First Century, 1862–1962 (Washington, DC: Office of the Surgeon General, Department of the Army, 1964). Lisa Marie Herschbach delves more deeply into the museum as memorial in “Fragmentation and Reunion: Medicine, Memory, and Body in the American Civil War,” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 1997). For the consolidation of Civil War medical authority and tensions around dead soldiers’ bodies in relation to the Army Medical Museum, see Sarah Handley-Cousins, Bodies in Blue: Disability in the Civil War North (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2019), 57–69. On the Army Medical Museum in the context of collections of human remains, see Samuel J. Redman, Bone Rooms: From Scientific Racism to Human Prehistory in Museums (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), 28–31. For a history of medical museums, see Erin Hunter McLeary, “Science in a Bottle: The Medical Museum in North America, 1860–1940,” (PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 2001).

6 Louis Bagger, “The Army Medical Museum in Washington,” Appleton’s Journal 9, no. 206 (March 1873): 295.

7 Altschuler uses the compelling term “epistemic crises” to describe moments or events that unsettle approaches to health and the living body. I find it applicable as well to death and the deceased. See Sari Altschuler, The Medical Imagination: Literature and Health in the Early United States (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018), 13–15.

8 Particularly relevant for this essay, see Erik R. Seeman, Speaking with the Dead in Early America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019); Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (New York: Knopf, 2008); Mark S. Schantz, Awaiting the Heavenly Country: The Civil War and America’s Culture of Death (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008); Dana Luciano, Arranging Grief: Sacred Time and the Body in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: New York University Press, 2007). On black soldiers’ experiences specifically, see Jim Downs, Maladies of Empire: How Colonialism, Slavery, and War Transformed Medicine (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2021), 114–36; and Margaret Humphreys, Intensely Human: The Health of the Black Soldier in the American Civil War (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008). For literature and artwork related to the Civil War dead, see especially Ian Finseth, The Civil War Dead and American Modernity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018); Eleanor Jones Harvey, The Civil War and American Art (Washington, DC and New Haven, CT: Smithsonian American Art Museum in association with Yale University Press, 2012); Lisa A. Long, Rehabilitating Bodies: Health, History, and the American Civil War (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004); and Timothy Sweet, Traces of War: Poetry, Photography, and the Crisis of the Union (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990). On war trophies and relics specifically, see Leora Auslander and Tara Zahra, ed., Objects of War: The Material Culture of Conflict and Displacement (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2018); Teresa Barnett, Sacred Relics: Pieces of the Past in Nineteenth-Century America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013); and Simon Harrison, Dark Trophies: Hunting and the Enemy Body in Modern War (New York: Berghahn Books, 2012). For discussion of the dead and death more generally, see Thomas W. Laqueur, The Work of the Dead: A Cultural History of Mortal Remains (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015); and Elizabeth Hallam and Jenny Hockey, Death, Memory, and Material Culture (Oxford: Berg, 2001).

9 Walt Whitman, Memoranda During the War, ed. Peter Coviello (1875; New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 8, 7.

10 “An Army Medical Museum: An Important Scientific Project of the Surgeon-General,” New York Times, November 15, 1862.

11 As Marten writes, “Forty-one percent of all northern white men born between 1822 and 1845 served in the Union Army, while the percentages were 60 for those between 1837 and 1845 and a whopping 81 for those born in 1843—the boys who turned eighteen in the war’s first year.” See James Marten, Sing Not War: The Lives of Union and Confederate Veterans in Gilded Age America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 4.

12 For details about African American regiments and medical care during the war, see Humphreys, Intensely Human. See also Gretchen Long, Doctoring Freedom: The Politics of African American Medical Care in Slavery and Emancipation (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012).

13 Susan-Mary Grant discusses this more fully in “Patriot Graves: American National Identity and the Civil War Dead,” American Nineteenth-Century History 5, no. 3 (Fall 2004): 82–83, as does Faust, This Republic of Suffering, 61–66. See also Richard A. Gabriel, Between Flesh and Steel: A History of Military Medicine from the Middle Ages to the War in Afghanistan (Washington, DC: Potomac Books, 2013), 131–41.

14 Joint Comm. on the Conduct of the War, S. Rep. No. 37–108, pt. 3, at 280, 467, 476, 477 (1863). “The Savages of Secessia,” Vanity Fair, May 10, 1862, 225, gives a very brief quotation from the Congressional Committee’s findings. Simon Harrison devotes a chapter to the American Civil War case in Dark Trophies, 93–106. See also Joan E. Cashin, “Trophies of War: Material Culture in the Civil War Era,” Journal of the Civil War Era 1, no. 3 (September 2011): 339–67; as well as Barnett, Sacred Relics, 82–83.

15 “The Rebel Lady’s Boudoir,” Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, May 17, 1862, 64; “Some Specimens of ‘Secesh Industry,” Harper’s Weekly, June 7, 1862, 368.

16 Thomas Nast, “After the Battle—The Rebels in Possession of the Field,” Harper’s Weekly, October 25, 1862, 680–81, 686. The text “The Savages of Secessia,” 225, reads: “Inhumanity to the living has been the leading trait of the rebel leaders, but it was reserved for your committee to disclose as a concerted system their insults to the wounded and their mutilation and desecration of tho [sic] gallant dead.”

17 “Address: Closing Exercises of the Session, 1895–95, Army Medical School, Including an Address by John H. Brinton, M.D., Philadelphia,” Journal of the American Medical Association 26, no. 13 (March 1896): 601.

18 Helen Sheumaker, Love Entwined: The Curious History of Hairwork in America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 57. Sarah Nehama in her study In Death Lamented: The Tradition of Anglo-American Mourning Jewelry (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 2012), 74, notes the rapid growth of hairwork businesses in Boston around the midcentury from four in 1841 to sixteen a decade later as recorded in the Boston Almanac. Elizabeth Hallam and Jenny Hockey helpfully write about “the corpse as memory ‘object’” in their discussion of body relics in Death, Memory, 131–41, 214.

19 Louisa May Alcott, Hospital Sketches (Boston: James Redpath, 1863), 65.

20 See Maureen DeLorme, Mourning Art and Jewelry (Atglen, PA: Schiffer, 2004), 37, who reproduces a panel like this, measuring 20 x 24 in.

21 See “Hair of the Presidents, Washington, DC, 1855,” National Museum of American History – Behring Center, Smithsonian, https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/search/object/nmah_524091 . Courtney Fullilove discusses Varden’s presidential hair mementos and the power they possess as historical and personal artifacts in “The Hair of Distinguished Persons in the Patent Office Building Museum,” Museum History Journal 10, no. 1 (2017): 50–67.

22 Sheumaker relates the story of the wreath in Love Entwined, 83–84.

23 Paul Bello provides full information on the Lincoln artifacts in the collection in “Lincoln Artifacts Examined During 150th Anniversary Tribute,” Micrograph, NMHM, May 18, 2015, last modified June 9, 2015, https://medicalmuseum.health.mil/?p=media.news.article.2015.05182015 . See also “The Autopsy of President Abraham Lincoln,” Visible Proofs: Forensic Views of the Body, National Library of Medicine, last modified June 5, 2014, https://www.nlm.nih.gov/exhibition/visibleproofs/galleries/cases/lincoln.html .

24 See Jennifer A. Watts, A Strange and Fearful Interest: Death, Mourning, and Memory in the American Civil War, exh. cat. (San Marino, CA: Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens, 2015), 105. For Charles DeCosta Brown’s connection to Lincoln, see John E. King, “President Lincoln and Dr. Brown,” Dental Corps History (blog), Association of Army Dentistry, February 15, 2016, https://www.associationofarmydentistry.org/dental-corps-history/u-s-army-dental-corps-brigadier-generals/ .

25 Both Gary Laderman, The Sacred Remains: American Attitudes toward Death, 1799–1883 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996), 103–16, and Faust, This Republic of Suffering, 66–88 offer detailed examples. See also Schantz, Awaiting the Heavenly Country, as well as James J. Farrell, Inventing the American Way of Death, 1830–1920 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1980), 99–145 on antebellum cemeteries.

26 See Faust, This Republic of Suffering, 86–94 and Laderman, The Sacred Remains, 109–13.

27 [Henry Jarvis Raymond], “Editor’s Table: The Sacredness of the Human Body,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 8, no. 47 (April 1854): 693.

28 Faust, This Republic of Suffering, 62. The quoted phrase is from Raymond, “Editor’s Table,” 691.

29 Raymond, “Editor’s Table,” 691. In Awaiting the Heavenly Country, 2, Schantz argues that the belief in a heavenly resurrection “made it easier to kill and to be killed.”

30 Alcott, Hospital Sketches, 37.

31 Raymond, “Editor’s Table,” 691–92. Laqueur talks about the transition of the dead body in the second half of the nineteenth century to “refuse rather than icon”; see Work of the Dead, 85.

32 Franny Nudelman, John Brown’s Body: Slavery, Violence, & the Culture of War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 3, 41–48. Laderman, The Sacred Remains, 82–85 gives a general overview of the debates over dissection. See also Michael Sappol, A Traffic of Dead Bodies: Anatomy and Embodied Social Identity in Nineteenth-Century America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002).

33 The Crimean War had likewise motivated the French and British to launch major medical studies. See Robert I. Goler, “Loss and the Persistence of Memory: ‘The Case of George Dedlow’ and Disabled Civil War Veterans,” Literature and Medicine 23, no. 1 (Spring 2004): 163.

34 I build here on Gary Laderman’s point; he limits this need to a desire for a last look at the beloved deceased. See The Sacred Remains, 151.

35 Bagger, “The Army Medical Museum,” 296.

36 Personal Memoirs of John H. Brinton, Major and Surgeon U. S. V., 1861–1865 (New York: Neale, 1914), 189–90.

37 Ames, Ten Years in Washington, 481–82; “Address,” 602; Kristen Pearlstein, “Maj. Gen. Daniel E. Sickles: His Contribution to the Army Medical Museum,” Micrograph, NMHM, July 21, 2021, last modified June 13, 2023, https://medicalmuseum.health.mil/micrograph/index.cfm/posts/2021/maj_gen_daniel_e_sickles; and “To Bind Up the Nation’s Wounds: Trauma and Surgery, ” Micrograph, NMHM, August 1, 2017, https://medicalmuseum.health.mil/index.cfm?p=visit.exhibits.past.nationswounds.page_02 . See also Woodward, “The Army Medical Museum,” 236. Devine in Learning from the Wounded, 197, quotes from a soldier’s letter that inquires about getting a photograph of his amputated limb in the collection, describing it as a relic of war.

38 Reports to the Curator, 1885–92, Curatorial Records, OHA 23, NMHM. These include memoranda with monthly visitor numbers.

39 “Army Medical Department,” New York Times, December 7, 1870; George A. Otis to Bvt. Brig. General Crane, 2 March 1869, Letterbooks of the Curators, 1863–1910, box 005, Curatorial Records, OHA 15, NMHM.

40 Letterbooks of the Curators, 1863–1910, boxes 006 and 007, Curatorial Records, OHA 15, NMHM.

41 Notices of Army Medical Museum Publications, 1865–81, box 001, Curatorial Records, OHA 18, NMHM.

42 For a detailed discussion of the Library and Billings’s efforts, see Devine, Learning from the Wounded, 250–52.

43 Bagger, “The Army Medical Museum,” 294.

44 Ibid., 294.

45 [Silas Weir Mitchell], “The Case of George Dedlow,” Atlantic Monthly 18, no. 105 (July 1866): 1–11 (11). Two essays in particular offer insights into Mitchell’s literary work in connection to his medical career and war experiences: Goler, “Loss,” 160–83, and Lisa Herschbach, “‘True Clinical Fictions’: Medical and Literary Narratives from the Civil War Hospital,” Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry 19, no. 2 (June 1995): 183–205. Other scholars have also compellingly discussed the piece, including Aura Satz, “‘The Conviction of its Existence’: Silas Weir Mitchell, Phantom Limbs and Phantom Bodies in Neurology and Spiritualism,” in Neurology and Modernity: A Cultural History of Nervous Systems, 1800–1950, ed. Laura Salisbury and Andrew Shail (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 113–29; and Long, Rehabilitating Bodies, 29–57. Altschuler specifically addresses the relationship between literature and medicine and late nineteenth-century tensions between medical knowledge and imaginative experimentation in The Medical Imagination, 183–91.

46 Silas Weir Mitchell, “Phantom Limbs,” Lippincott’s Magazine of Popular Literature and Science 8, (December 1871): 564. Mitchell notes that aside from one possible case, losing all four limbs was not survivable. Mitchell was also responding to the outpouring of sympathy his story inspired; readers, believing it to be true, worked to raise funds for the fictional Dedlow and tried to visit him.

47 Mitchell, “George Dedlow,” 8, 11.

48 Ibid., 1, 11.

49 Goler, “Loss,” 170. A concise description of the Army Medical Museum’s photographic collection can be found in Eric W. Boyle, ed., National Museum of Health and Medicine: Guide to Collections, rev. ed. (Silver Spring, MD: Otis Historical Archives, 2014), 2, 29–32, https://medicalmuseum.health.mil/assets/documents/collections/NMHM_Guide_to_Collections-revised2015.pdf. Notable discussions of the photographs include J. T. H. Connor and Michael G. Rhode, “Shooting Soldiers: Civil War Medical Images, Memory, and Identity in America,” InVisible Culture, no. 5, (Winter 2003): 2–18; Robert I. Goler and Michael G. Rhode, “From Individual Trauma to National Policy: Tracking the Uses of Civil War Veteran Medical Records,” in Disabled Veterans in History, ed. David A. Gerber (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000): 163–84; Kathy Newman, “Wounds and Wounding in the American Civil War: A (Visual) History,” Yale Journal of Criticism 6, no. 2 (Fall 1993): 63–86; Keith F. Davis, “‘A Terrible Distinctness’: Photography of the Civil War Era,” in Photography in Nineteenth-Century America, ed. Martha A. Sandweiss (Fort Worth, TX: Amon Carter Museum, 1991), 159–61; and Alan Trachtenberg, Reading American Photographs: Images as History, Mathew Brady to Walker Evans (New York: Hill and Wang, 1989), 114–18.

50 See in particular Goler, “Loss,” 169; Connor and Rhode, “Shooting Soldiers”; and Davis, “‘A Terrible Distinctness’” 160. Bradley P. Bengston and Julian E. Kuz, ed., Photographic Atlas of Civil War Injuries: Photographs of Surgical Cases and Specimens (Grand Rapids, MI: Medical Staff Press, 1996) reproduces the Otis Historical Archives surgical photographs of the Army Medical Museum.

51 Erin O’Connor, “Camera Medica: Towards a Morbid History of Photography,” History of Photography 23, no. 3 (Autumn 1999): 235.

52 On Bontecou’s photographs, see Blair Rogers, “Reed B. Bontecou, M.D.—His Role in Civil War Surgery and Medical Photography,” Aesthetic Plastic Surgery 24, no. 2 (March 2000): 114–29; Stanley B. Burns, Shooting Soldiers: Civil War Medical Photography by R. B. Bontecou (New York: Burns Archive, 2011); and Newman, “Wounds and Wounding,” 63–86.

53 George A. Otis to Constant Guillon, 13 December 1864; Surgeon General’s Office to Mr. Washburne, 25 October 1865; Surgeon General’s Office to Messrs. Holmes, Booth, and Haydens, 5 January 1866, box 002, Curatorial Records, OHA 15, NMHM.

54 Two letters from Otis, on 5 July 1866, address this, written to wounded soldiers in Maine and Pennsylvania. Letterbooks of the Curators, 1863–1910, box 003, Curatorial Records OHA 15, NMHM.

55 Newman, “Wounds and Wounding,” 63.

56 Tanya Sheehan touches on this briefly in Doctored: The Medicine of Photography in Nineteenth-Century America (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2011), 65. Alternatively, Connor and Rhode read the Museum photographs as securing the “personal identity” of veterans in pension claims in “Shooting Soldiers,” 8.

57 [Edward L. Wilson], “Government Photography,” Philadelphia Photographer 3, no. 31 (July 1866): 214. Sheehan’s reading of this same passage emphasizes its “vision of photographic and surgical operators working together” which is also the case; see Sheehan, Doctored, 62.

58 Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 63. Both Goler’s and Newman’s consideration of Scarry in their texts cited above have been helpful to my reading.

59 Goler in “Loss,” 167, reads this differently. For him, the wounds are unyielding markers of defeat, what he calls “inscriptions of loss,” that create a disjuncture in the photographs.

60 Newman addresses the layers “of this dependency” the photographs signal in “Wounds and Wounding,” 73.

61 Personal Memoirs, 190.

62 In his discussion of race and the war, and particularly the effects of deracialization in wartime antislavery and African American writings, Finseth, The Civil War Dead, 63 uses the provocative phrase “the racelessness of death,” and I have drawn from it here given how apt it is for the material nature of bones.

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Julia B. Rosenbaum

Julia B. Rosenbaum is an associate professor at Bard College, specializing in American visual culture with interests in public art, art and science/medicine, and issues interrelating visual imagery with political identity. Her current research focuses on conceptions of embodiment, able-bodiedness, and disability from the Civil War era to the early twentieth-century [Art History and Visual Culture Department, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY 12504, [email protected]].