Courtney for 9/28

I spent most of this weekend doing research for my oral report, which is on Civil War medicine and hospitals.  I browsed through hundreds of images:  Creepy ten-types of soldiers with vague expressions and stumps for legs.  Dozens of wounded soldiers lying under trees waiting for medical attention, their arms and legs contorted like broken twigs.  Saws and scalpels that looked more like something from a horror movie than something that should be in a hospital.  Throughout all of this I felt that I got a sense of the “real war” that Whitman spoke of.

Today, the exposure that civilians get of war is so diluted and contrived.  The bloody sheets and dead bodies are kept far from view of the public; out of sight and out of mind.  Even coffins respectfully draped with an American flag are considered too controversial for public consumption.

It is especially interesting to me that Whitman saw the importance of an honest portrayal of the war, even in a time when most people were exposed to it in a much more realistic way.  I’ve been thinking about the psychological effects of a war that takes place, not on the other side of the world, but in your back yard.  And of an enemy that is not foreign and unfamiliar but your brother or neighbor.  It’s easy to throw a blanket over thousands of fallen patriots, either “North” or “South,” “Confederate” or “Yankee.”  However, Whitman seems to see the importance in looking closely at the faces of these soldiers and contemplating their experiences and motivations.

In Memoranda During the War, when he says, “The actual Soldier of 1862-’65, North and South, with all his ways, his incredible dauntlessness, habits, practices, tastes, language, his appetite, rankness, his superb strength and animality, lawless gait, and a hundred unnamed lights and shades of camp — I say, will never be written — perhaps must not and should not be,” perhaps he’s talking about the other side of the coin.  As tragic as it may be, there is a certain amount of heroism and glory in dying on the battlefield.  I think there is validity in trying to preserve this image.

To switch gears a little, I also found out this weekend that no account of Civil War Medicine is without mention of Clara Barton.  She seems a bit like a female version of Whitman himself.  She joined the throws of women, with little to no medical training, to help assist their country in the bloodiest of ways: as nurses.  These women dropped everything to support a nation that had not even granted them the right to vote.  In Barton’s poem she says calls these women, “nurses, consolers, and saviors of men.  These women truly were angels, and our history as a nation is much more complete with their stories told honestly.

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