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Sick from Freedom: African-American Illness and Suffering during the Civil War and Reconstruction de Jim Downs

Sick from Freedom: African-American Illness and Suffering during the Civil War and Reconstruction

Autor Jim Downs
en Limba Engleză Paperback – 15 ian 2015

Adresat studenților în istorie americană, cercetătorilor politicilor de sănătate publică și practicienilor interesați de sociologia medicinei, Sick from Freedom oferă o perspectivă sobră asupra prețului biologic al emancipării. Observăm cum Jim Downs reconstruiește o perioadă critică în care dobândirea libertății juridice a fost dublată de o vulnerabilitate fizică extremă. Autorul demonstrează că prăbușirea economiei de plantație a declanșat o criză sanitară fără precedent, transformând migrația foștilor sclavi într-o luptă pentru supraviețuire în fața epidemiilor de variolă și holeră.

Apreciem rigoarea cu care Downs analizează limitările Biroului Freedmen. Deși instituția a angajat peste 120 de medici, prioritățile sale au fost dictate mai degrabă de necesitatea de a crea o forță de muncă sănătoasă decât de un imperativ umanitar universal. Cititorii familiarizați cu Doctoring Freedom de Gretchen Long vor aprecia modul în care volumul de față completează imaginea luptei pentru autonomie corporală, punând însă un accent mai mare pe eșecul instituțional și pe consecințele fatale ale subfinanțării spitalelor din Sud.

Merită menționat că această lucrare prefigurează temele din Maladies of Empire, unde Downs extinde analiza asupra modului în care corpurile celor marginalizați au servit drept bază pentru progresul medical. Sick from Freedom nu este doar o cronică a suferinței, ci o analiză structurală a modului în care biopolitica a modelat începuturile Americii moderne, inclusiv impactul asupra nativilor americani din Vest. Este o lectură esențială pentru a înțelege rădăcinile istorice ale inegalităților sistemice de sănătate.

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Specificații

ISBN-13: 9780190218263
ISBN-10: 0190218266
Pagini: 280
Dimensiuni: 159 x 234 x 17 mm
Greutate: 0.42 kg
Editura: Oxford University Press
Colecția OUP USA
Locul publicării:New York, United States

De ce să citești această carte

Această carte este recomandată celor care doresc să înțeleagă complexitatea Războiului Civil dincolo de victoriile militare. Cititorul câștigă o perspectivă documentată asupra modului în care politicile publice pot eșua în momente de tranziție socială. Este un studiu de caz fundamental despre intersecția dintre libertate, sănătate publică și rasism sistemic, oferind argumente istorice solide pentru dezbaterile contemporane despre accesul la îngrijire medicală.

Despre autor

Jim Downs este un istoric recunoscut, specializat în istoria medicinei și a drepturilor civile, ale cărui lucrări investighează adesea experiențele grupurilor marginalizate. În Sick from Freedom, el utilizează expertiza sa în cercetarea arhivelor pentru a aduce la lumină episoade ignorate ale istoriei americane. Temele sale recurente — de la suprimarea votului în Voter Suppression in U.S. Elections la istoria comunității LGBT în Stand by Me — reflectă un angajament constant față de recuperarea vocilor uitate. Prin Maladies of Empire, Downs s-a consacrat ca o voce autoritară în studiul modului în care colonialismul și sclavia au modelat epidemiologia modernă.

Descriere

Bondspeople who fled from slavery during and after the Civil War did not expect that their flight toward freedom would lead to sickness, disease, suffering, and death. But the war produced the largest biological crisis of the nineteenth century, and as historian Jim Downs reveals in this groundbreaking volume, it had deadly consequences for hundreds of thousands of freed people.In Sick from Freedom, Downs recovers the untold story of one of the bitterest ironies in American history--that the emancipation of the slaves, seen as one of the great turning points in U.S. history, had devastating consequences for innumerable freedpeople. Drawing on massive new research into the records of the Medical Division of the Freedmen's Bureau-a nascent national health system that cared for more than one million freed slaves-he shows how the collapse of the plantation economy released a plague of lethal diseases. With emancipation, African Americans seized the chance to move, migrating as never before. But in their journey to freedom, they also encountered yellow fever, smallpox, cholera, dysentery, malnutrition, and exposure. To address this crisis, the Medical Division hired more than 120 physicians, establishing some forty underfinanced and understaffed hospitals scattered throughout the South, largely in response to medical emergencies. Downs shows that the goal of the Medical Division was to promote a healthy workforce, an aim which often excluded a wide range of freedpeople, including women, the elderly, the physically disabled, and children. Downs concludes by tracing how the Reconstruction policy was then implemented in the American West, where it was disastrously applied to Native Americans. The widespread medical calamity sparked by emancipation is an overlooked episode of the Civil War and its aftermath, poignantly revealed in Sick from Freedom.

Recenzii

Sick from Freedom is a welcome corrective to the prevailing triumphalist view of emancipation, providing a much-needed perspective on its tragic epidemiological impact.
One comes away from this book with no doubt that the path out of slavery was a minefield of death and disease that needs its proper acknowledgement in histories of reconstruction.
An important challenge to our understanding of an event that scholars and laypeople alike have preferred to see as an uplifting story of newly liberated people vigorously claiming their long-denied rights.
A major turning point in how we understand the African-American past, the nation's past, and their intertwining.
Based on extensive research, particularly in the Freedman's Bureau's Medical Division records, the book details the enormity of the public health crisis that afflicted freed people during and after the Civil War... This is revisionist history at its finest, and it deserves a wide audience. Highly recommended.
Jim Downs' exceptional research has resulted in a major study... Highly recommended.
Sick from Freedom is a welcome addition to the literature on the history of the Civil War and Reconstruction, medicine, and public health... [T]hought-provoking.
Sick from Freedom is beautifully written... The author dedicates this work to 'all those who were emancipated but never made it to freedom'. He honors their memories in this excellent and haunting book.
As Jim Downs makes clear in this carefully documented work, the Union leadership, domestic and military, was wholly unprepared to deal with the breakdown of the system of slavery that followed the Union army with every foray into southern soil... One comes away from this book with no doubt that the path out of slavery was a minefield of death and disease that needs its proper acknowledgment in histories of reconstruction.
A signal contribution to the vastly understudied question of freedpeople's health and a formidable challenge to the dominant analytical framework that has heretofore framed our understanding both of the transition from slavery to freedom in the American South and the meaning of death and dying in the era of the Civil War. It, quite simply, remaps a field.
A fresh and ambitious account of the Civil War era that not only interrogates the transition from slavery to freedom in new and unsettling ways but also invites us to rethink the geographical dimensions of Reconstruction.
Charts new, darker, and profoundly revealing paths into the history of the American emancipation in the Civil War. In a work of medical, social, labor, and military history all at once, Downs shows that achieving freedom for American slaves was a signal triumph, but only through a horrible passage of disease, suffering and death. A 'new' history of emancipation is emerging, and Downs is one of its most talented and innovative craftsmen.
Jim Downs paints a startling and little known portrait of African American emancipation in which struggles for health and survival must be factored alongside the political and economic history of the period.
Traces a shrouded chapter of American history: the mass death and medical devastation that visited African Americans in the immediate wake of legal emancipation. Downs compellingly reveals how the confluence of racial slander, government indifference, and medical malign neglect proved widely fatal, and in doing so he paints a detailed and disheartening portrait of man's inhumanity to man.
An important contribution to understanding the process of emancipation and the suffering so many freedpeople endured.
Downs insists that understanding the scale of the medical crisis for African Americans during the war is critical to the idea of what freedom felt and looked like for those who were trying to experience it... This book reminds us that this grim portrait must be a part of any discussion of the years that messily separate African American slavery from freedom.
Downs' book places the Civil War in another perspective that helps the reader think critically beyond the Emancipation Proclamation ... I would highly recommend this book.

Notă biografică

Jim Downs is Associate Professor of History and American Studies at Connecticut College. He is the editor of Taking Back the Academy: History of Activism, History as Activism and Why We Write: The Politics and Practice of Writing for Social Change.