Tag: medicine

Editor’s Note: June 2020 Issue

Themes of movement and mobility unite the essays in this issue. We begin with Amy Murrell Taylor’s 2019 Watson Brown Award acceptance speech for her book Embattled Freedom: Journeys through the Civil War’s Slave Refugee Camps. The speech encapsulates a central contention of Taylor’s book—that movement was critical to the ...
Read More
A Transnational View of Medicine and Medical Practices during the Civil War

A Transnational View of Medicine and Medical Practices during the Civil War

Interest in the medical history of the Civil War has increased in recent years, not in small part due to Shauna Devine’s Tom Watson Brown Award-winning work, Learning from the Wounded.[1] Tens of thousands of U.S. and Confederate soldiers suffered some form of injury in the course of the Civil ...
Read More
Caring for Veterans: The Civil War and the Present

Caring for Veterans: The Civil War and the Present

In recent history, the state of veteran healthcare has received negative media coverage. The United States Department of Veterans Affairs suffered immense scrutiny for the deaths of at least forty United States veterans who died awaiting assistance. The deaths of these veterans prompted investigations and the eventual dismissal of Secretary ...
Read More
Mercy Street header depicting three characters and a battle scene

Mercy Street’s Season Two Premiere: Radical Medical Procedures, Rebel Spies, ‘That’ Pinkerton, and the Plight of the Contrabands

Season one of PBS’s Civil War hospital drama, Mercy Street, took historical accuracy seriously, often reflecting recent historiography. Even its annoyingly inaccurate storyline involving John Wilkes Booth’s plot to blow up the hospital during a Lincoln visit was loosely based on actual events. The season ended with a cliffhanger involving ...
Read More
Screenshot 2016-01-10 at 7.23.20 PM

PBS’s Mercy Street: Series Premiere “The New Nurse” Offers More Than Blue and Gray’s Anatomy

Mercy Street, Ridley Scott’s, fresh, compelling six-part drama captures the gritty, dangerous experience of medical caregiving during the Civil War. The series debuts January 17th on PBS, immediately following Downton Abbey. Set inside Mansion House Hotel, a makeshift hospital in Alexandria, Virginia in 1862, Mercy Street is narrated from the ...
Read More