In April 1992, a handful of young physicians, not one of them a surgeon, was trapped along with 50,000 men, women, and children in the embattled enclave of Srebrenica, Bosnia-Herzegovina. There the doctors faced the most intense professional, ethical, and personal predicaments of their lives. Drawing on extensive interviews, documents, and recorded materials she collected over four and a half years, doctor and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Sheri Fink tells the harrowing--and ultimately enlightening--story of these physicians and the three who try to help them: an idealistic internist from Doctors without Borders, who hopes that interposition of international aid workers will help prevent a massacre; an aspiring Bosnian surgeon willing to walk through minefields to reach the civilian wounded; and a Serb doctor on the opposite side of the front line with the army that is intent on destroying his former colleagues. With limited resources and a makeshift hospital overflowing with patients, how can these doctors decide who to save and who to let die? Will their duty to treat patients come into conflict with their own struggle to survive? And are there times when medical and humanitarian aid ironically prolong war and human suffering rather than helping to relieve it?

Nine of the 192 Union military hospitals during the Civil War circulated newspapers edited and printed by convalescents. The horrors of wound infection and amputation were reported in the words of surgeons, nurses and patients. Sermons cautioned against drink, tobacco and profanity while stressing patriotic sacrifice. Those who experienced the war wrote about it in simple narratives, and these are extensively quoted. Convalescent life was painful and terrifying. Bedridden for months with fever and festering wounds, disabled veterans wondered who would respond to their needs. Who would hire them? Who would marry them? This book covers the founding and development of nine hospital newspapers, each fully explored for such topics as patriotism, politics, religion, satire, romance and marriage, battlefield experience and treatment of prisoners of war.

During the Civil War, thousands of wounded Union soldiers and Confederate prisoners convalesced in a general army hospital in rural Portsmouth Grove, Rhode Island. Because of its location on the periphery of the action, the hospital has remained a footnote to the dramatic sweep of Civil War literature. However, its history and the experiences of the doctors, nurses, patients and guards that gave it life provide a new perspective on the interaction between the army and society in wartime and on life in Civil War America. This in-depth account also explores the barbarities of medicine, daily routine in a general army hospital, the role of citizens in providing aid, the later adventures of former patients and staff, and the final resting places of those who died on the grounds.

As the Civil War's toll mounted, an antiquated medical system faced a deluge of sick and wounded soldiers. In response, the United States created a national care system primarily funded and regulated by the federal government. When New Haven, Connecticut, was chosen as the site for a new military hospital, Pliny Adams Jewett, next in line to become chief of surgery at Yale, sacrificed his private practice and eventually his future in New Haven to serve as chief of staff of the new thousand-bed Knight U.S. General Hospital. The "War Governor," William Buckingham, personally financed hospital construction while supporting needy soldiers and their families. He appointed state agents to scour battlefields and hospitals to ensure his state's soldiers got the best care while encouraging their transfer to the hospital in New Haven. This history of the hospital's construction and operation during the war discusses the state of medicine at the time as well as the administrative side of providing care to sick and wounded soldiers.

Beyond the Civil War Hospital understands Reconstruction as a period of emotional turmoil that precipitated a struggle for form in cultural production. By treating selected texts from that era as multifaceted contributions to Reconstruction's »mental adaptation process« (Leslie Butler), Kirsten Twelbeck diagnoses individual conflicts between the »heart and the brain« only partly compensated for by a shared concern for national healing. By tracing each text's unique adaptation of the healing trope, she identifies surprising disagreement over racial equality, women's rights, and citizenship. The book pairs female and male white authors from the antislavery North, and brings together a broad range of genres.

During World War II, the army established 107 evacuation hospitals to care for the wounded and sick in theaters around the world. An evacuation hospital was a forward hospital accepting patients from the battlefield. It was where the wounded first received definitive care. Formed at Camp Breckenridge, the 95th Evac arrived in Casablanca in April 1943, with seven thousand troops, thirty doctors, and forty nurses. First pitching their tents at Oujda, they moved eastward toward Algeria before making a D-day landing on the beaches of Salerno, Italy, on September 9, 1939. Shortly thereafter, they entered Naples, then set up shop at Anzio before moving on to become the first American hospital to penetrate Nazi-occupied Europe. After the guns were silent, records show that these doctors and nurses had treated over 42,000 Americans in almost all the critical battles of the European theater: Salerno, Monetcassino, Anzio, southern France, the Battle of the Bulge, the Rhineland, and finally, the invasion into Germany. Hospital at War is the story of the 95th Evac Hospital as told by Zachary Friedenberg, a young surgeon at the time, fresh out of his internship. He tells the story of how the men and women of the 95th survived the war. He describes how they solved problems and learned to treat the war-wounded in the extreme heat of North Africa and during the frigid winters of the Rhineland. He tells how they endured shelling and a bombing of the hospital and how they adjusted to the people and the countries in which they worked. By the end of their two-year tour of duty, the men and women of the 95th Evac were superbly efficient. A casualty who made it to their facilities had a 99 percent chance of surviving. For anyone who wants to know how so many of our boys made it home despite horrific injuries, this book provides part of the answer.