Sick from Freedom

African-American Illness and Suffering During the Civil War and Reconstruction

By: Jim Downs

Narrated by: Gabriel Bush

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 freed people. 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 freed people, 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.

©2012 Oxford University Press (P)2013 Audible, Inc.

Fantastic history

This book sheds light on extremely important issues that still have an impact on today’s American society. Any serious American history scholar or healthcare professional would find this book mandatory.

Poignant, Revealing, Inhumanity of Whites

This is a must read for all those in the ongoing struggle for justice and true freedom. We must never forget the brutality inflicted upon the bodies of BIPOC, and continue to push ahead for Reparations and hopefully, healing. Europeans have committed the greatest sins and inhumanity the world has ever known, and must know.

Annoying AF

The voice actor for this title apparently was not contracted to correctly pronounce the words in this book. A few simple clicks at YouTube would have given him the correct pronunciation for cholera, dispensary, inundated, and MANY MORE! It is extremely distracting to be periodically shouting at the actor with the correct pronunciation of words that were common in the 19th century. Too bad he was entirely unmotivated to do a adequate job reading this book, because the book itself is interesting.