Racial Knowledge, Medical Science, and the American Civil War

FAIN: FT-60490-13

Leslie A. Schwalm
University of Iowa (Iowa City, IA 52242-1320)

This project studies emancipation as a critical moment in the history of ideas about race as they became an increasingly important aspect of American medical science and public health policy during and after the Civil War. Two converging and mutually constitutive developments serve as the project's focus: the modernization of American military and civilian medicine, and a new elaboration of evolving medical and scientific beliefs in racial categories of difference. Tracing the collection and analysis of medical and anthropometric data about African Americans conducted by various medical and military officials (including civilian health care workers as well as the U.S. Army and the United States Sanitary Commission) during the Civil War, this project demonstrates how medical science was recruited in the service of firmer, more irrefutable racial ideologies after the war.

Associated Products

A Body of "Truly Scientific Work": The U.S. Sanitary Commission and the Elaboration of Race in the Civil War Era (Article)
Title: A Body of "Truly Scientific Work": The U.S. Sanitary Commission and the Elaboration of Race in the Civil War Era
Author: Leslie A. Schwalm
Abstract: During the Civil War, the U.S. Sanitary Commission was much more than a philanthropic soldier-relief organization. It also engaged in what commission president Henry Bellows called "truly scientific work," work that Bellows believed was the commission's main chance at "being valued as men of mark in time to come." A significant portion of that scientific work consisted of a large-scale endeavor to identify and catalog anatomical and physiological evidence of racial inferiority in the bodies of African American soldiers. Using the tools of anthropometry and social surveys, the northern white members of the commission expressed their commitment to an increasingly intransigent racial essentialism that endured long after the wartime destruction of slavery.
Year: 2018
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: The Journal of the Civil War Era
Publisher: The Journal of the Civil War Era

Black Bodies, Medical Science, and the Age of Emancipation (Book Section)
Title: Black Bodies, Medical Science, and the Age of Emancipation
Author: Leslie A. Schwalm
Editor: Sean Morey Smith
Editor: Christopher D. E. Willoughby
Abstract: Medicine and Healing in the Age of Slavery is at the cutting-edge of the history of medicine and slavery. By placing enslaved people at the center of the volume, this emerging-generation of scholars quite brilliantly embody the promise of Diasporic studies. Their essays persuasively decenter Western biomedical frameworks as the exclusive driving force in investigating the history of medicine and health.
Year: 2021
Publisher: Lousiana State University Press
Book Title: Medicine and Healing in the Age of Slavery
ISBN: 9780807171219

Medicine, Science, and Making Race in Civil War America (Book)
Title: Medicine, Science, and Making Race in Civil War America
Author: Leslie A. Schwalm
Year: 2023
Primary URL: https://www.worldcat.org/search?q=1469672693
Primary URL Description: WorldCat entry (1469672693)
Publisher: University of North Carolina Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 1469672693

---