Butte College history instructor Dillon Carroll probes what he calls this "hidden history": "Soldiers, doctors, and civilians all grappled with war trauma--the long collateral damage of combat--in ways previously unknown to historians."
His newly-published book, an extraordinary scholarly study that reads like a novel, examines the coping mechanisms of soldiers (they were not merely victims), the responses of then-prevalent "insane asylums," and how families connected battlefield experience with the decaying minds of their loved ones more swiftly than the doctors.
"Invisible Wounds: Mental Illness And Civil War Soldiers" ($45 in hardcover from LSU Press; also for Amazon Kindle) draws on hundreds of sources, including letters, diaries, and medical records (especially from the Government Hospital for the Insane, known as "St. Elizabeth's").
What emerges is a nuanced and measured cultural history of what may well have been PTSD in an age before the advent of brain science and psychiatry (which replaced the work of "alienists" who tried to figure out the causes of a soldier's alienation from society).
Alienists explained madness, without obvious physical causes (like syphilis), as the result of immorality (including "intemperance, masturbation, overwork, domestic difficulties, excessive ambition, personal disappointment, excessive religious enthusiasm, and overweening jealousy or pride").
Not every combatant suffered ongoing mental debilitation. "Black soldiers ..., imbued with a sense of purpose and a desire to strike back at the trauma of slavery, were less susceptible to this than white soldiers."
Almost thirty years after Appomattox, Carroll writes, some "survivors of the war's battles and their aftermath were still suffering with nervousness, kept awake by insomnia, and, when they did sleep, awakened by terrifying nightmares. The boom of the cannon, the gurgle of the dying patient, and howl of the bloodhound haunted the repose of many Civil War veterans."
Carroll's analysis of first-person accounts helps readers understand "why"--and why coming to terms with the hidden wounds of war is so difficult.
