Shooting Soldiers: Civil War Medical Images, Memory, and Identity in America

Founded in 1862 just after the onset of the Civil War, the Army Medical Museum would become the nation’s premier educational and research institution for the study of military medicine. Its original mission was the collection and classification of all manner of battlefield injuries, wounds, war-related illnesses and causes of death. Over the next 140 years the Museum’s collection of medical images –in particular its photographs—were used and interpreted in ways that were often akin to their original purpose, sometimes far removed from it. As we will show through analysis of selected but representative examples from the archival collections of the successor to the Army Medical Museum,4 Civil War medical photographs became medical research materials; evidentiary documents to support disability and pension claims; a commodity to be sold or traded for personal, commercial or institutional gain; occasional worthless scraps; historical artifacts; and fine art images. We are not the first to acknowledge the intellectual power and resilience of these particular medical images, thus this paper is a further contribution to the growing literature dealing with them and medicine’s visual culture in general. But it is our hope that this discussion will provide a more detailed and more nuanced examination of this case in support of the contention that the visual culture of medicine, like other forms of visual culture, is not merely a “mirror that reflects national identity, but rather a complex venue for its interpretation.