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Chapter 2 - “Strewn promiscuously about”

Limbs and What Happens to Them

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 June 2024

Sarah E. Chinn
Affiliation:
Hunter College, City University of New York
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Summary

Chapter 2 explores accounts by Civil War nurses and surgeons – first-person nonfiction, lightly fictionalized narrative, sensationalized memoir, and fiction. The central texts in this chapter are Walt Whitman’s Memoranda after the War, Louisa May Alcott’s Hospital Sketches, John Brinton’s Personal Memoirs, Susie King Taylor’s Reminiscences of My Life in Camp, and S. Weir Mitchell’s “The Case of George Dedlow.” These narrators represent amputation in different ways, especially the scene of amputation itself, the image of a basket or trough of dismembered limbs, and amputee reflections on the relationship between their remaining bodies and their absent limbs. However, for all the narrators in these texts, amputation is part of a meditation on the meanings of intact and amputated bodies, and their role in making sense of the Civil War. The chapter ends with a discussion of the Army Medical Museum, in which amputated limbs were catalogued, stored, and displayed as examples of the damage done by gunshots and shells. This dovetails with a reading of George Dedlow, in which the protagonist’s legs, stored in alcohol at the Museum, return to him briefly during a séance, absurdly marrying hopes for bodily resurrection with spiritualism’s belief in a humanized heaven.

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  • “Strewn promiscuously about”
  • Sarah E. Chinn, Hunter College, City University of New York
  • Book: Disability, the Body, and Radical Intellectuals in the Literature of the Civil War and Reconstruction
  • Online publication: 13 June 2024
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009442657.003
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  • “Strewn promiscuously about”
  • Sarah E. Chinn, Hunter College, City University of New York
  • Book: Disability, the Body, and Radical Intellectuals in the Literature of the Civil War and Reconstruction
  • Online publication: 13 June 2024
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009442657.003
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • “Strewn promiscuously about”
  • Sarah E. Chinn, Hunter College, City University of New York
  • Book: Disability, the Body, and Radical Intellectuals in the Literature of the Civil War and Reconstruction
  • Online publication: 13 June 2024
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009442657.003
Available formats
×