Our October 2025 LMCC meeting took place on Wednesday, Oct. 29 at 5:30pm over Zoom (although for our November meeting, 
we do plan to return to the HHIVE Lab, also known as Greenlaw 524 or Gaskin Library, with options for members to join via Zoom as well).
We discussed the scholarly monograph Rehabilitating Bodies: Health, History, and the American Civil War by Lisa A. Long (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004). Specifically, we asked everyone to focus on the following:
- Introduction: “Year That Trembled and Reel’d beneath Me” (pp. 1-28)
- Suggested optional reading: Any additional chapter of your choice
If you missed the meeting, you can still access the texts on the Readings page of this site!
You can also access the recording of our meeting here.
A few reminders and announcements:
- Be sure to follow LMCC on Twitter and Instagram to show your support and receive regular updates!
- If you want to get more involved with LMCC, please send us other resources we should post to the site or suggestions for improvements, additions, future readings, etc. We’d love to hear your ideas and input! (See our email addresses on the Home page of this site.)
- Also, please feel free to spread the word about LMCC to other interested graduate or professional students at UNC.
We will be in touch soon with more details about our upcoming November meeting!
Long, Lisa A. Rehabilitating Bodies: Health, History, and the American Civil War. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013. De Gruyter Brill, https://doi-org.libproxy.lib.unc.edu/10.9783/9780812202663. Originally published by the University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004.
Some key concepts:
- The illegibility of bodies and of history
- Historiographic unreliability/inaccessibility
- Relationship between historical and medical discourse
- Corporeality
- Individual bodies vs. the national body
- To “re-habilitate” and to “re-member”
- Melding genres
Meeting notes:
- How bodies are preserved, transported, or displayed. Reminiscent of Bone Rooms: From Scientific Racism to Human Prehistory in Museums by Samuel J. Redman (Harvard UP, 2016) from our March 2025 meeting.
- Memory inscribed on bodies
- History comprising bodies; if bodies are illegible, then so is history
- The American Civil War vital to the development of modern medicine: tons of new materials to study and the ability to document such research
- The nineteenth century and invisible diseases
- Neurasthenia: nerve exhaustion resulting from modernity
- Challenges to the omniscience of medical discourse
- Feeling vs. sentience
- Concepts of masculinity leading to self-destruction
- Bodies missing limbs; Civil War as a metaphorical amputation
- Bri recommends:
- Mark S. Micale, Hysterical Men: The Hidden History of Male Nervous Illness (Harvard UP, 2008)
- Chris Walsh, “‘Cowardice Weakness or Infirmity, Whichever It May Be Termed’: A Shadow History of the Civil War,” 2013
- Chris Walsh, Cowardice: A Brief History (Princeton UP, 2014)
- See also: Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century (University of California Press, 2014)
- Corporeal praxis vs. spontaneous utterings
- “Deformity” vs. amputation: some people chose to have a “deformed” limb amputated
- The rise of cometic surgery/reconstructive surgery, masks, corporeal censorship
- The rise of photography, including “before-and-after” photos regarding reconstructive surgery
- Editing as a form of cosmetic surgery
- “Re-habilitation” and the ability to “re-member”
- What’s preserved bodily? Textually? Historically? Fictionalized and then circulated?
- What matters? What is no longer matter?
- How many pieces of myself can I lose while still maintaining my sense of self, my identity?
- Categorization, limits (textual as well as battlefield triage)
- Malingering: “faking” an illness to pursue attention, to avoid labor/battle
- Weirr Mitchell has become mostly just a character (in Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper”)
- Gendered perception of and experiences of time
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Note: The featured image for this post is an image taken from Long’s monograph (p. 3). The full caption reads:
Figure 1. “Retreat of Our Troops from Bull Run by Moonlight, Colonel Blenker’s Brigade Covering.” Harper’s Weekly, August 10, 1861. Courtesy of the Rare Book and Special Collections Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.