Medicine, Science, and Making Race in Civil War America by Leslie A. Schwalm (review)

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Reviewed by:

• Medicine, Science, and Making Race in Civil War America by Leslie A. Schwalm
• Rana A. Hogarth

Medicine, Science, and Making Race in Civil War America. By Leslie A. Schwalm. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2023. Pp. xvi, 215. Paper, $24.95, ISBN 978-1-4696-7269-4; cloth, $99.00, ISBN 978-1-4696-7268-7.)

Leslie A. Schwalm has put her impressive skills to work in her latest book, Medicine, Science, and Making Race in Civil War America. In this powerful study, Schwalm investigates the Union army’s project of systematically collecting data on the bodies of Black and white troops under the guise of advancing what contemporaries “often described as the ‘science of man”’ (p. 48). Not only did northern medical men preserve the belief that Blackness and Black bodies were inferior even as the system of racial slavery was coming to an end, but they also contributed to the longevity of race science as a legitimate sub-discipline practiced by highly trained experts. Schwalm’s book complements existing histories of the American Civil War that focus on the war’s relationship to science, public health, and medical knowledge production. Schwalm focuses on Union medical men and their statistics-driven quest to locate and prove the existence of embodied racial difference. In this regard, Schwalm joins the likes of Margaret Humphreys, Jim Downs, and Gretchen Long—scholars whose work foregrounds the racial dimensions of health and disease during the Civil War and documents the ever-present racism that African Americans faced during their wartime freedom struggles.

The bulk of the book is about white Union medical personnel’s view of Black people rather than Black people’s interactions with white northerners who purported to have their interests at heart. That said, Schwalm dedicates sections of her book to the unique struggles Black people faced as they [End Page 623] mobilized for war. Indeed, the first two chapters offer background on how Black people had to navigate wartime either as soldiers, denied fair treatment and dignity, or as physicians, rebuffed when they sought to work in Black regiments. Schwalm also recounts how Black women were deliberately shut out of most wartime relief activities of the United States Sanitary Commission (USSC). It is a familiar story of racial discrimination, and Schwalm’s rendering seeks to amplify African American women’s responses to this exclusion through the creation of their own relief associations.

The third and fourth chapters are arguably the strongest. Schwalm zeroes in on the undercurrents of anti-Black sentiment that steered the Union’s efforts at measuring racial features during the war. She taps into a wide range of sources, including records from the USSC and the correspondence of white Union medical personnel, to show the extent to which Black men’s bodies were compared against the white—the assumed normative body. With measurements and questionnaires, Union medical officials bequeathed future generations of race scientists with a specialized vocabulary for mapping race traits. Benjamin A. Gould, astronomer and leader in the USSC’s statistical bureau; Ira Russell, Union surgeon and abolitionist; and Benjamin R. Woodward, surgeon in the Twenty-second Illinois Infantry, are just some of the figures who aimed to make the alleged distinctiveness of Black troops’ bodies legible through quantification and study.

Finally, Union personnel also legitimated claims of Black inferiority through their work with cadavers and anatomical specimens. Schwalm explores how Union medical men took advantage of the extraordinary and tragic opportunities the Civil War presented for dissection and surgery. They frequently engaged in the material and figurative preservation of racial biological determinism by anatomizing Black troops’ remains, often with little respect for them. While this story of commodifying Black people’s bodies in the name of medicine may be familiar to specialists working in the history of race and medicine, it remains an instructive story that needs to be shared among scholars with broad interests in the Civil War, race, and the history of African American experiences in wartime.

Rana A. Hogarth University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Copyright © 2024 The Southern Historical Association ...