The art of medicine Emancipation, sickness, and death in the American Civil War

摘要

The American Civil War has often been described as the "bloodiest war" in US history, with the death of about 700000 soldiers between 1861 and 1865. Unfolding alongside of this tragic story has been the more triumphant account of the war as the victorious ending of the institution of slavery and the freeing of the slaves. Although the war certainly succeeded in dismantling plantation slavery, more than a million former slaves became sick and tens of thousands died during this bloody war. These events have often been overlooked, and instead a narrative has developed about emancipation that emphasises how the war led to economic opportunities, education, and political suffrage for freedpeople in the postwar period between 1865 and 1877. Yet between 1862 and 1865, freed slaves entered into environments marked by conflict, in which more soldiers died from camp diseases-pneumonia, typhus, and dysentery-than from battle. As a result, when the institution of slavery crumbled, countless numbers of former slaves also lost their lives.