Showed to people who have not seen it and how realistic is it . Ashley it is a scripted drama that takes place at a union field hospital. Exceeding a Union General , hospital. It is pretty accurate. They worked with a lot of historians. They did a lot of research into both what occupied alexandria was like an specific family members the green family, a major character in the show. They were real people. Some of the physicians and surgeons and other folks are composites of the various people who would have worked there, but there is a lot of reality. The New York Times called it grays anatomy with crinolines, pretty good description . The fabric that civil war women would have worn. Ashley which i think is pretty accurate. Which makes it pretty accurate. As much as there is medicine and history, it is also really funny and there is drama and love stories and other stuff. Sarah, what interested the aha in putting together a discussion . Why were they interested in having a discussion on what mercy street means to historians . Sarah i think ashley is the one who came up with the idea for the panel, and it came out of conversations she and i had been having as we watched each episode of the show on twitter, tweeting at each other about the ways that things were portrayed or little bits we could see of historians work coming out in the show. Oh, that came out of that book. We wanted to have a moment where we could reflect on the show but also on the historians work that went into the show. From what you have seen in the first season, how is the accuracy portrayed . Compare it to maybe others civil war era film or video productions. What sets mercy street apart is that it is in the hospital and not on the battlefield or even in washington or a political sphere. It is a story about nurses and doctors and the patients, the soldiers themselves, but it is set apart from the battlefield. I think that is really reflective of the historiography and the scholarship happening right now on the civil war. It is sort of a turn not entirely away from the battlefield but it turn towards the larger stories of the war. Like the whole field of civil war medicine has been written about a lot more in the last 10 or 20 years, and now making it on to network television. Ashley i think that is definitely true. One of the things we spent a lot of time talking about was the ways in which right now is this is the only story about the civil war you can tell . And does it feel appropriate for this particular moment in American History, where we have wars in iraq and afghanistan, more and more men and now women coming back with real disabilities, either mental or physical, and what does that what is the appeal right now of a story about war trauma broadly understood 150 years ago. It strikes me there are some residents resonance between the past and present. What should people who watch it know about the reality, history of civil war medicine . What changed during the civil war for doctors and the wounded . Sarah the one thing to keep in mind is how much Clinical Experience they were able to get. They had thousands of men coming through field hospitals, general hospitals, even specialty hospitals. The civil war is when you see the development of specialty hospitals. In philadelphia, turners lane hospital opens, a nervous diseases clinic for nervous disorders. I think before the war, medical education they just did not get that kind of handson training. You would have gone to two years of lectures where the second year repeated the first. I think going and serving in the army they got so much more , experience and were able to rapidly get so much more data really about the ways illness and wounds progressed. Your focus has been on disabled veterans. Obviously a lot of veterans coming out of the civil war with incredible wounds and disabilities from those ones. Amputations, etc. What did you learn in your research . I learned that not all disabilities and civil war disabilities looked the way we expect. A lot of the time when people think about disability, they think about amputation. But amputation only made up a fairly small percentage of the entirety of civil war disabilities. One of the people i write about extensively is a soldier that a lot of people might be familiar with, Joshua Lawrence chamberlain. He fought at the battle of gettysburg. He was profoundly disabled after the battle of petersburg in his hips and his groin. But it was all underneath his clothing, so no one really knew. It was not something that people assumed about him when they saw him. It did not always look the way we think it did. He carried shrapnel with him all of his life and lived until his late 80s. ; he died 50 years after he was initially wanted. His mobility was profoundly impaired by that wound, he was sick a lot of the time from repeated infections. What do we know about what now would be called ptsd . Did they begin to identify the psychological impacts of war as early as the civil war . Ashley that is a really tricky question. It was one at the center of my dissertation project and that we talked about a lot yesterday on our panel. This is an era before freud. He is not really doing anything yet. Certainly people in america are not thinking about trauma as a psychological condition, so when physicians in the civil war use the word trauma, they mean that in a traumatic injury. A bullet wound or savor one, Something Like that. Wound, Something Like that. But they were deeply aware that men were coming back for more changed and the changes were not good. They knew they were coming back and something had happened to them, but they were struggling with ways to make sense of that. One of the ways they made sense of that was through particular diagnoses of physical complaints. For example, a character mentioned in mercy street in the First Episode studied heart conditions in soldiers. We read the symptoms today and think it is a panic attack. The symptoms are rapid heart read, shortness of wrath tunnel , vision, numbness in your face, that kind of thing. But they dont have a concept of anxiety or panic the way we do today, so he said it was a cardiac disease associated with men who had seen hard service. It is a complicated answer because i dont want to say that posttraumatic stress disorder existed in 19th century and they just did not know the name for it because i think that is condescending to the doctors and how Much Research they did. At the same time, there is no doubt these men were scarred and they carried real physical symptoms with them long after the war. Physical symptoms of emotional problems. Ashley it was before conversion disorder, which is the other way maybe to think of it. What is that . Ashley simply understood is when your body manifests a psychological complaint. A good example is anxiety manifesting as heart palpitations. Whether or not he was describing a kind of conversion disorder is unclear, but he was not thinking of it in any way like that. Ashley touched on specialty hospitals that came out of the civil war. Individual hospitals. How did the treatment of vets after the war change the sorts of fields that doctors got into and hospitals that were created . You mentioned joshua chamberlain, who lived a long time, and so did a lot of other civil war vet. Sarah he lived for quite a while, 50 years. In terms of medical care, some physicians work at the soldiers homes, which were institutions created for veterans to live out sometimes for a certain number of years, other times for the remainder of their life, they lived in government run homes for veterans. Some doctors did work there. I dont know if veterans veterans did not have their own hospitals the way we have a v. A. System today. The United States government did give them pension payouts and they use the money however they would, so it had to cover food on the table but also medical care. You get a pension whether you were disabled or not . Sarah the pension law changes. Initially, the pension law only covered men who had been disabled in service during their time in the war. After the war is over, it changes couple of times. By the time chamberlain was dying in the early 20th century, it covered anyone who had served in the war. What do you think the army learned from the treatment of troops on the field from the civil war . Civil war . Ashley i dont think either of us doesnt on onfield surgery. A lot of what i have learned is about triage and the way they would bring people back. How were they deciding who to treat when. Getting them off the field. Sarah getting them off and back to hospitals away from the frontlines. Does treatment during the war change over the course of the war . They start the war in 1861. Is the treatment better in 1865 . Have they gotten better . They had gotten better at providing care and they were a lot more organized. The Army Medical Department becomes a lot more organized over the course of the war. The other thing they learned was they were in touch with physical bodies. Doctors were not allowed to perform autopsies the way we do now in medical schools. They did not have access to corpses. One of the best learning tools during the war was the access they had to mens bodies, whether it was fixing wounds or healing wounds, or access to their bodies after they were dead. This takes us back to mercy street because it is a tv program. The showing of intense medical scenes of operating rooms, etc. , how real is it and how visceral . Ashley one of the things i love is the extent to which it is clear how physical being a dr. Was in the 19th century. Today as well, but there is an habitation seen in the third episode you will know exactly what im talking about. Dr. Foster is sawing this with sweat dripping down his face. There is blood. You can tell it is physical , grueling work. That was one thing i liked. The other thing i think is so interesting, we talked yesterday with one of the creators. They had physicians and surgeons train the actors. When you are watching them do type ligatures or amputations or perform surgeries, the actors , whether or not they are great at it, learn the techniques and they practice it. Sarah they are not doing cgi, or anything like that. They are getting their hands dirty. No artificial no special effects limited, anyway. But not computergenerated. What were the most common types of injuries . Sarah i am probably going to get the statistics wrong, but i think most wounds were to the trunk, the core, which were generally not survivable. I think a lot more people survive core injuries in mercy street then actually did. Another reason why we think of amputations, but i think a lot more people were injured in ways that were not their limbs. Ashley again because it is more we think about it as physical injury, but so many of the men who were casualties were casualties of sickness. Infectious disease, environmental, unclean water, that kind of thing. A lot of the men who ended up suffering the rest of their lives from disabilities were suffering from a lingering sickness. A lot of the men i studied who were diagnosed with irritable heart, they may not have that the rest of their lives, but they continue to have symptoms from a series of infections during the war, whether that was malaria, your double heart typhoid. , Sarah Chamberlain also had malaria the rest of his life. Something he contracted during the war, malaria. Did doctors, scientists learned about the avoidance of those diseases in camp and elsewhere from the civil war . Sarah not so much malaria, i dont think. Smallpox, they worked very hard to try to inoculate soldiers from smallpox, to try to avoid epidemics you see in season two of mercy street. We had a teaser of that the other night. They work really hard to inoculate soldiers, which was controversial. It was relatively new to them. Ashley one of the things so interesting about this period is on one hand, the rise of germ theory is starting to happen. But you also have miasma theory which has a strong hold. They are aware they need to contain epidemics, but they are still concerned about the circulation of air and they are very concerned about keeping water clean in particular ways that we now would think, why does it matter if the air is circulating that way . But they were still trying to make sense of these two competing modes of understanding. The miasma theory fell by the wayside. Fell out of favor. Ashley a bit later, but by the civil war, there is some debate about it. I think that is also part of what made it difficult to control diseases, in part a product of the Sanitary Commission could put forth a bunch of recommendations but getting soldiers to follow them if soldiers had been raised to think it did not matter was really tough. What first brought both of you, your interest in this area of Civil War History . Sarah i was looking for something. I wanted to study the civil war, specifically the real effects of the war. I think i was really affected by what we have been learning recently just as citizens about what warfare does to people. I found myself thinking, if these things are happening to our soldiers today, what was that experience like then . I started to look, and i found chamberlains story, and that is what brought me into it. That was my hook, was chamberlains story. Ashley i came at it from a slightly different perspective. Before i came to grad school, i worked for a couple of years in public health. In that position i started asking questions that demanded historical explanations, and my boss who is lovely was like that , is not what we do in public health. Great questions, but you have to go someplace else to do that. That is how i came to history. I happened i really wanted to find out about how patients understood their own health. What is great about the army is they kept fantastic records. I was able to read pension records, this incredibly rich source of information about how men understood their own bodies after their time in the war. I kind of backed into it, but i love it, and now i am asking questions that take me further back in time. Back to the televisual appeal of mercy street. Where do you think it rates with other civil war films, etc. In terms of its accuracy . Ashley it is immaculately researched. Sarah they spent a lot of time and energy going to historians and sharing scripts and having historians go line by line into the scripts and make edits or as or make suggestions or the way they could change it that would make it more accurate or the stories they could tell that would better tell the story of that time. It is really accurate. I think compared to many other depictions of the civil war, it is not depicting the civil war that was glorious. Instead, it is showing you the nittygritty of what all war is really like. Some historians see either television or Film Productions on the civil war and going it is another tv show or film about the civil war, why should i watch . Or they are not doing it right. Ashley i, of course, love it. I love it. To me my responses never, oh, another thing about the civil war. I may have gone into it a bit skeptical, but this is what i do, so i did go into it thinking, how well could they have possibly done . And then i loved it for all these reasons. Sarah a lot of historians are treating mercy street a little bit differently because it is telling a different story of the civil war. It is not a typical heroic battle story. I think a lot of people were willing to give it more of a chance. Ashley it is not a plantation story. It is treating slavery in much more nuance and detail than almost any i cant think of another civil war story, specifically civil war that is doing as much as this show is doing with slavery. Thank you both for being here at the american historical association. Like us on facebook at cspan history. Each week, American History tvs railamerica brings you archival films that provide context for todays issues. This is on efforts by soviet agents to use disinformation, forgery and the spreading of fake news to further their cold war agenda. This includes interviews with journalists and several defectors
comparemela.com © 2020. All Rights Reserved.