Book News: Civil War Camps and Soldier Health

Military Historian Earl Hess's astonishingly prolific capacity for authoring detailed scholarly works on a wide range of topics without sacrificing depth of research and overall quality seems neverending. Before I'd even finished reading and reviewing his current book (Civil War Cavalry), news of his next publishing project, Shattered Courage (Kansas, March '26), already arrived. But that's not all that's on the immediate horizon.

In May of 2026, Kent State University Press will publish Hess's Civil War Camps and Soldier Health: Sanitation and Military Effectiveness in the Union Army. CWBA's tracking of publishing trends over the past two and a half decades has revealed a plethora of modern works exploring Civil War medicine and what factors affected the health and well-being of Civil War soldiers in camp and in the field. There is little doubt that Hess's upcoming study will produce some interesting, important, and perhaps contrarian contributions to that literature. Content details are absent at this early date, but, just going from the title alone, I'm particularly looking forward to reading Hess's assessment of the interplay between sanitation measures and Union Army effectiveness. While the focus is on the boys in blue, presumably the book will raise at least some targeted points of comparison between the two sides.