Booknotes: The Surgeon's Battle

New Arrival:

• The Surgeon's Battle: How Medicine Won the Vicksburg Campaign and Changed the Civil War by Lindsay Rae Smith Privette (UNC Press, 2025).

One of the most striking parts of Eric Michael Burke's award-winning study of the Union Army's Fifteenth Corps [reviewed here] was its illuminating tracing of the immense non-combat cost of operating for an extended period among the swamps and bayous of the Mississippi River's Louisiana bank. During that interval of the Vicksburg Campaign (the months leading up to Grant's epic crossing of the great river), Burke estimated that as many as 3,500 men were lost to the corps through illness, death, and permanent discharge.

Clearly, there was still much to learn as the war entered its middle period. Indeed, managing soldier health was a major factor in every campaign, but the mosquito-infested Mississippi River Valley presented challenges that exceeded those found in most parts of the country where Civil War armies camped, marched, and fought. Beginning with the Vicksburg Campaign's origins in 1862 and following it through the end of the siege operation in July 1863, Lindsay Rae Smith Privette's The Surgeon's Battle: How Medicine Won the Vicksburg Campaign and Changed the Civil War explores the ways in which Union forces managed their medical services on the way toward achieving victory at Vicksburg and beyond.

From the description: "Between May 1 and May 22, 1863, Union soldiers marched nearly 200 miles through the hot, humid countryside to assault and capture the fortified city of Vicksburg, Mississippi. Upon its arrival, the army laid siege to the city for a grueling forty-seven days. Disease and combat casualties threatened to undermine the army’s fighting strength, leaving medical officers to grapple with the battlefield conditions necessary to sustain soldiers' bodies. Medical innovations were vital to the Union victory. When Vicksburg fell on July 4, triumph would have been fleeting if not for the US Army Medical Department and its personnel."

In common with much of the recent literature, Privette applies a multi-disciplinary approach to her own study, which "seeks to integrate the scholarship on Civil War medicine with environmental history, soldier studies, and traditional military history." The result is a complex portrait that strongly challenges older claims that Civil War medicine was an "abject failure" when it came to addressing the conflict's stunning death toll from disease (pg. 7).

More from the description: "By centering soldiers' health and medical care in the Union army’s fight to take Vicksburg, Lindsay Rae Smith Privette offers a fresh perspective on the environmental threats, logistical challenges, and interpersonal conflicts that shaped the campaign and siege. In doing so, Privette shines new light on the development of the army’s medical systems as officers learned to adapt to their circumstances and prove themselves responsible stewards of soldiers' bodies."