Overview

Most histories of wounded Civil War veterans construe them as feminized men whose manhood has suffered due to their inability to provide for and raise families or engage in business. Wounded for Life complicates this picture by examining how seven veterans—six soldiers and one physician—coped with their changed bodies in their postwar lives. Through these intimate stories, author Robert D. Hicks looks at the veteran's body as shaped by the trauma of the battlefield and hospital and the construction of a postwar identity in relation to that trauma. Through his research, he reveals the changing social circumstances of the late 19th and early 20th centuries as they impacted the traumatized veteran's body. This engaging book is equal parts Civil War history, disability and gender history, and the history of the body that discloses the impact of war on a wounded warrior.

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9780253070760

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Reviews

"""Robert Hicks has given us a book that redefines the way we understand the Civil War soldier His scholarship foregrounds the long-term physical, social, and cultural effects of military service, which are transferable and critical to understanding the costs of war today.""—Peter C. Miele, Executive Director, Seminary Ridge Museum ""In Wounded for Life, Robert Hicks offers a deeply thoughtful and thought-provoking analysis of the lived experiences of wounded Union soldiers and veterans. Sharply written and richly nuanced, this book offers a powerful look at the gendered complexities of living a disabled life in the nineteenth century.""—Sarah Handley-Cousins, author of Bodies in Blue: Disability in the Civil War North ""Wounded for Life is a fascinating and ground-breaking work of intersectional scholarship. Like the bodies of the men whose wounds it biographies, this book ""contains multitudes"" of convergent histories: cultural and historical, medical and personal. Tracing the lives of seven veterans from their wounding and treatment through their navigation of disability and ongoing medical interventions in the postbellum decades, Hicks reveals the multiplicity of public and private embodiments they performed in an effort to survive. Rigorously researched and compulsively readable, this book will resonate with those interested in 19th century studies, the US Civil War, medical history, disability, gender, and trauma studies. This ""wound's eye history of the body"" will haunt the reader long after the final page.""—Lindsay Tuggle, author of The Afterlives of Specimens: Science, Mourning, and Whitman's Civil War"

Author Information

Robert D. Hicks, PhD, is author of Civil War Medicine: A Surgeon's Experience and an independent scholar of the history of science and medicine. He was formerly a Senior Consulting Scholar and William Maul Measey Chair for the History of Medicine at the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, and for over a decade, he served as Director of the Mütter Museum and Historical Medical Library at the college. He holds a doctorate in history from the University of Exeter, United Kingdom, and degrees in anthropology and archaeology from the University of Arizona.

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