Drawing on archives of the U.S. Sanitary Commission, recollections of Civil War soldiers and medical workers, and testimonies from Black Americans, Leslie A. Schwalm exposes the racist ideas and practices that shaped wartime medicine and science. Painstakingly researched and accessibly written, this book helps readers understand the persistence of anti-Black racism and health disparities during and after the war.

Meet our guest:

Dr. Leslie A. Schwalm is Professor Emeritus of history and gender, women's, and sexuality studies at the University of Iowa, where she taught courses on women's and African American history, slavery, emancipation, and the Civil War. She is the author of prizewinning articles, books, and chapters on women's experiences of slavery, emancipation, and the Civil War ( A Hard Fight for We: Women's Transition from Slavery to Freedom in South Carolina (1997); the struggle for freedom and civil rights in the post-Civil War Midwest (Emancipation's Diaspora: Race and Reconstruction in the Upper Midwest (2009) ; and most recently, the centrality of anti-Black racism to Civil War medicine and science (Medicine, Science, and Making Race in Civil War America (2023).  She is also co-founder of the Iowa Colored Conventions Project, tracing the political activism of Black Iowans through eighteen statewide conventions in the second half of the 19th century.