Many of the rituals that we now understand to make up the American funerary tradition were developed and shaped in the 19th century
by David Price Leave a Comment
Personal Hygiene
Discover the stunning history of Civil War prosthetics and the men that wore them.
Many of us associate the Victorian era with an image of a delicate woman swooning on a couch, incapacitated by her monthly visitor. Where did this image originate? And how closely did it hew to the reality of women’s lives in Victorian America?
Victorian Americans, like us, spent a lot of time thinking about how to not get pregnant.
After emancipation, what came next? Overcrowded and unsanitary, health conditions in contraband camps made freedpeople increasingly susceptible to smallpox.
Did you know Louisa May Alcott, famous for writing Little Women, was a Civil War nurse?
A sea-change in embalming came with the Civil War, during which there was an outcry for fallen soldiers to be returned to their families for burial.
When we think of Civil War medicine, we often think of gore, like amputated limbs and bloody gunshot wounds. But these traumatic injuries did not make up the majority of a Civil War surgeon’s daily work. Instead, it was the camp diseases like dysentery and typhoid, infectious disease like smallpox, and – as we saw in this week’s episode of Mercy Street – venereal diseases.
If Hastings really was a Nightingale-nurse, she forgot some of her most important lessons.
