"What Means This Carnage?": Civil War Soldiers' Bodies, Recuperative Projects, and the Army Medical Museum.
- Resource Type
- Article
- Authors
- Rosenbaum, Julia B.
- Source
- Art Bulletin. Dec023, Vol. 105 Issue 4, p64-87. 24p.
- Subject
- *MATERIAL culture
*HUMAN body
*AMERICAN Civil War, 1861-1865
*MILITARY museums
*ART & war
AMERICAN Civil War casualties
- Language
- ISSN
- 0004-3079
This essay is about bodies in war and a bone collection. In 1862 during the American Civil War, the US War Department established the Army Medical Museum with the mandate to collect morbid anatomy from the battlefield. It was a dramatic response to the existential crisis posed by wounded and dead Union soldiers. Its creation engaged two differing mid-19thc. epistemological orientations devoted to the care of the human body: the emerging field of medical science and antebellum mourning rituals. Treating the museum as an object of material culture, I track its visual strategies to grapple with war's carnage and national dissolution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]