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Mending Broken Soldiers: The Union and Confederate Programs to Supply Artificial Limbs. By Guy R. Hasegawa. Foreword by James M. Schmidt. (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 2012. Pp. [xvi], 126. $24.95, ISBN 978-0-8093-3130-7.)
Nearly a century and a half after the Civil War's end, the soldier-amputee remains one of that conflict's most persistent icons. At roughly 45,000 in number, amputees represented a minority of the war's wounded survivors. Nevertheless, the visual and literary tropes of amputation-piles of discarded limbs, ex-soldiers hobbling on crutches, peg legs, and "empty sleeves"-are central to the war's popular memory (p. x). And yet scholars have paid surprisingly little attention to the ways Civil War-era governments attempted to re-limb their most visible casualties.
In Mending Broken Soldiers: The Union...