Ross of Longwood University delivered the keynoted address. The theme of this year’s conference was “Science, Medicine, and Technology in the Civil War.” The Center encouraged scholars to analyze how the momentous scientific and technological changes occurring during the nineteenth century influenced both the Civil War and its participants.ĭr. This was the Center’s eighth academic conference. The Center for Civil War Research hosted its annual Conference on the Civil War October 9-10. While self-care often proved superior to relying upon the inchoate military medical infrastructure, commanders chastised soldiers for testing army discipline, ultimately redrawing the boundaries of informal health care."Science, MEdicine, and technology in the Civil War" In order to improve their health, soldiers periodically had to adjust their ideas of manliness, class values, and race to the circumstances at hand. Meier explores how soldiers forged informal networks of health care based on prewar civilian experience and adopted a universal set of self-care habits, including boiling water, altering camp terrain, eradicating insects, supplementing their diets with fruits and vegetables, constructing protective shelters, and most controversially, straggling. Using soldiers' letters, diaries, and memoirs, plus a wealth of additional personal accounts, medical sources, newspapers, and government documents, Kathryn Shively Meier reveals how these soldiers strove to maintain their physical and mental health by combating their deadliest enemy-nature. In the Shenandoah Valley and Peninsula Campaigns of 1862, Union and Confederate soldiers faced unfamiliar and harsh environmental conditions-strange terrain, tainted water, swarms of flies and mosquitoes, interminable rain and snow storms, and oppressive heat-which contributed to escalating disease and diminished morale.
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