Saturday, May 31, 2008

Civil War medicine, if you can take it

The Springfield-based weekly Illinois Times has a brace of articles on Civil War medicine by Tara McClellan McAndrew: an extended notice of Glenna Schroeder-Lein's new Encyclopedia of Civil War Medicine (211 short articles in 419 pages, $95), and an account of how medicine was practiced at Springfield's training-ground-cum-prison Camp Butler. For the second story she used some archival material from the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library, as the camp's records were destroyed in an 1865 fire. Lein is manuscripts librarian at ALPL, and describes herself as someone who "feel faint at the sight of blood," but who wished she'd had a comprehensive medical resource like the encyclopedia when she was writing her dissertation. I think this is likely to be either a must-have or a reason for frequent library visits for those of us with Civil War research targets.

Book budget maxed out? WorldCat shows it in 46 libraries so far...

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