The Lewis and Clark journals report an outbreak of venereal disease among the men three weeks after their visit with the Arikaras. The disease was most likely a result of their sexual contact with the Arikara women and most likely syphilis, yet there is no evidence of syphilis on the bones of the early 19th century Arikara. We examine this mystery and explanations for this discrepancy.

Mystery of the Bones

History

Lowry, Thomas P.

Willey, P.

Europe

Vallombrosa Press

The Story the Soldiers Wouldn't Tell: Sex in the Civil War

The Story The Soldiers Wouldn't Tell: Sex In The Civil War

Biographies & Memoirs

Leaders & Notable People

BOOKS-ON-TAPE, INC.

One of the greatest challenges faced by William Clark and Meriwether Lewis on their 1804–6 Corps of Discovery expedition was that of medical emergencies on the trail. Without an attending physician, even routine ailments and injuries could have tragic consequences for the expedition’s success and the safety of its members. Of these dangers, the most insidious and potentially devastating was the slow, painful, and oftentimes fatal ravage of venereal disease. Physician Thomas P. Lowry delves into the world of nineteenth-century medicine, uncovering the expedition’s very real fear of venereal disease. Lewis and Clark knew they were unlikely to prevent their men from forming sexual liaisons on the trail, so they prepared for the consequences of encounters with potentially infected people, as well as the consequences of preexisting disease, by stocking themselves with medicine and the latest scientific knowledge from the best minds in America. Lewis and Clark’s expedition encountered Native peoples who experienced venereal disease as a result of liaisons with French, British, Spanish, and Canadian travelers and had their own methods for curing its victims, or at least for easing the pain it inflicted. Lowry’s careful study of the explorers’ journals sheds new light on this neglected aspect of the expedition, showing in detail how sex and venereal disease affected the men and their mission, and describes how diverse peoples faced a common threat with the best knowledge and tools at their disposal.

Venereal Disease And The Lewis And Clark Expedition

Americas

University Of Nebraska Press

From 1861 through 1865, southern women fought a war within a war. While most of their efforts involved activities such as rolling bandages and organizing charity fairs, many women in the Confederacy, particularly in border states, challenged Federal authority in more direct ways: smuggling maps, medicine, and munitions; aiding deserters; spying; feeding Confederate bushwhackers; cutting Federal telegraph wires. Thomas P. Lowry's investigation into some 75,000 Federal courts-martial - uncovered in National Archives files and mostly unexamined since the Civil War - brings to light women caught up in the inexorable Unionist judicial machinery. Their stories, published here for the first time, often in first-person testimony, compose a picture of courage and resourcefulness in the face of social, military, and legal constraints.

Confederate Heroines: 120 Southern Women Convicted by Union Military Justice

Louisiana State Univ Pr

17 b/w photos 6 x 9 An engaging roster of curmudgeons, drunkards, and fools From the author of The Story the Soldiers Wouldnt Tell Thomas P. Lowrys Tarnished Eagles is the first systematic look at Civil War courts-martial, and . . . it offers the surprising finding that officers, in fact, were in trouble more often than the enlisted men. . . . Lowry lets their court-martial records speak for themselves . . . while drawing some far- reaching conclusions from their experiences as a whole. William C. Davis More than 100,000 men in the Union army faced courts-martial during the years of the Civil War. In this new study, the author has chosen 50 Union colonels and lieutenant colonels to highlight the difficulties in placing civilians unfamiliar with the rigors of army life in command. For example, one colonel was so drunk he fell off his horse; another was nicknamed Stumpy because he tended to shout orders from behind a tree stump. The stories of these tragicomic characters, and of many more contained herein, will add significant commentary to the burgeoning study of Civil War misbehavior. Dr. Thomas P. Lowry is a retired professor of psychiatry. He is the author of The Story the Soldiers Wouldnt Tell, The Attack on Taranto, and The Civil War Bawdy Houses of Washington, DC. In February 1863 a third set of charges appeared in the record, illustrating Lords talent for getting himself into trouble in multiple venues. . . . At Cottage Landing, Virginia, he was so drunk that he made an indecent exposure of his person in the presence of a lady, after which he rode his horse into a gully and fell headlong from the saddle.

Tarnished Eagles

Stackpole Books

Foreword by Robert K. Krick, 8 b/w photos 6 x 9 "Amid the flood of Civil War books that washes over us each year, Dr. Thomas Lowry's works have long stood out for their brilliant research, originality, and insight. Now, with his accomplished co-author Dr. Jack Welsh, he has produced a work as fascinating to the average reader as it is useful to the specialist. Tarnished Scalpels offers us a richer portrait of our greatest war's reality than could any other ten books on the subject. These are tales of folly, fear, and shame, well told by men who understand both medicine and good writing." -Owen Parry, author of Faded Coat Of Blue As in his previous book, Tarnished Eagles (0-8117-1597-3), Thomas Lowry-this time with Jack Welsh-brings to light the various misdeeds of Union officers. In this new book, the authors examine the relationship between the principles of the medical profession and the often byzantine regulations of the army. As a result, the courts-martial in this book primarily fall into two categories: failure to practice proper medicine and failure to follow the procedures and administrative rules that govern army life, with some overlap. As usual, Lowry peppers many of these accounts with his dry wit, but he also offers penetrating analyses of the problems faced by many of these doctors, who often were forced to work under intolerable conditions. Thomas Lowry, a retired psychiatrist, is the author of several books on the Civil War, including the controversial The Story the Soldiers Wouldn't Tell: Sex in the Civil War (0-8117-1515-9). Jack D. Welsh, professor of medicine emeritus at University of Oklahoma, has written for and edited many medical journals, including the New England Journal of Medicine. He is also the author of Medical Histories of Confederate Generals and Medical Histories of Union Generals.

Tarnished Scalpels: The Court-Martials of Fifty Union Surgeons

Welsh, Jack D.

The Attack on Taranto: Blueprint for Pearl Harbor

Wellham, John W. G.

On November 11, 1940, 21 slow, canvas-covered British warplanes, launched from the carrier Illustrious, attacked the harbor at the Italian port of Taranto and put most of the Italian navy out of commission. This all-but-forgotten operation, the authors argue, deserves historical recognition as an inspirational precedent for the Japanese raid on Pearl Harbor 13 months later. Taranto demonstrated that battleships in a shallow, heavily defended harbor could be sunk by a handful of torpedo-bombers. That lesson Adm. Isoroku Yamamoto, commander-in-chief of the Japanese fleet, learned well-while the American military virtually ignored it. “By this single stroke the balance of naval power in the Mediterranean was decisively altered.” –Winston S. Churchill

Attack on Taranto (Stackpole Classics)

Wellham, John

Military

Sexual Misbehavior in the Civil War

Over three million young men left home, shouldered rifles, and set about killing one another in the 1860s. Behind, they left wives and sweethearts. The 50,000 books about the war have told us in meticulous detail about the strategy, tactics, weapons, uniforms, canteens, famous generals, religious beliefs, personality quirks, fortifications, battles, sieges, gunboats, medical care, and recruiting policies. The causes of the war have been endlessly analyzed. The surviving veterans wrote hundreds of memoirs, sometimes inflating their own heroism and importance. What rarely appears in this literature is any mention of sex, in spite of most soldiers being in their early twenties, a time of manly vigor. The late 19th century brought the ascendancy of Victorian prudishness and hypocrisy. The Comstock laws sent men to prison for mailing contraceptive advice. Just advice! Whatever willingness there might have been to reveal wartime hanky-panky evaporated in the tenor of the time and the admiring gaze of the veteran's growing grandchildren. The following scene would be unimaginable: the old veteran sits by the stove in the country store. His long white beard covers his tattered vest. A faded medal graces his chest. On the floor are the shavings from his most recent whittling. A tiny child pipes up: "Tell us about the war, grandpa." "Well, Jimmy, there was this pretty little whore in Memphis." Never happen. Material collected twenty years ago resulted in the author's 1994 book, The Story the Soldiers Wouldn't Tell - Sex in the Civil War, which presented everything that was then known on the subject. There had been no previous book on Civil War sex. Since then, the author and his wife, Beverly, have read over 90,000 court-martials and countless letters and diary entries. What emerges is that sexual activity was far more common and public than our previous research or any memoir had ever revealed. The records come from literally every corner of the country: Key West, Washington Territory, Los Angeles, and Maine. The malfeasants are both officers and enlisted men. The victims range from six-year girls to sixty-year old grandmothers. The soldiers carried with them lewd books and obscene photos. Even more striking is the universality of houses of prostitution. Every village and every city neighborhood has at least one such-and everybody knew it. They knew the addresses of the houses. They knew the names of the madams and the names of many of the "girls." Most of the witnesses for the trials had visited the houses, for the usual reasons. The military police tramped through the houses, looking for deserters. Rape, thought to be rare during the war, was not that rare. An unexpected finding was that Union soldiers, who were supposedly freeing the slaves, were quick to rape black women. An even more surprising finding was that the Confederate army had a policy of not prosecuting rapists, whether the victim was black or white. The inventor of the Graham cracker had, in 1834, written a book claiming that masturbation caused severe illness, even death. This idea had taken root in the medical profession and many army doctors testified that a defendant was not guilty because of "insanity from self-abuse." The Union army's largest hospital listed dozens men, dead from "masturbation." The famous ship Monitor had a thick iron turret. In other such ships, the sound-proof turret proved a convenient place for old sailors to rape young boys. A Union cavalry colonel was tried for sexually assaulted both men and women. Evidence for Civil War homosexuality was unknown until now. Even more astonishing stories appear in the records: sex with horses, sheep, even with chickens and turkeys. There are records of obscene tattoos, foul cursing by Winfield Scott Hancock, black and white mistresses of Confederate generals, even many records of "fornication and bastardy" in the little village of Gettysburg. Ads for abortion clinics appeared on the front pages of newspaper

Sexual Misbehavior in the Civil War: A Compendium

Literature & Fiction

History & Criticism

Xlibris, Corp.

Tens of thousands of Civil War letters still exist, mostly asking about family health, and telling of long marches, sore feet, bad food, diarrhea, malaria, and the occasional battle. Largely lost are those letters telling of physical love, of the private moments of amorous life. Yet some letters have survived, speaking vividly and unashamedly of pre-war passionate embraces, wartime longings for absent lovers, and hope for blissful reunions in the marital bed. One soldier wrote of looking forward to bondage and disciple games in the bedroom, wearing their “favorite uniform” – bare skin. Another man wrote to his wife begging her to write him sexually explicit letters, telling her how much he would treasure such words. A Rhode Island infantryman wrote a few passionate pages, then noted his physical arousal and changed the subject. Single young men, without wives or regular sweethearts, corresponded at length, comparing the prostitutes of Maine, New York, Washington, DC, and Louisiana, and adding cautionary notes about syphilis, gonorrhea, and the painful treatments therefore. One man, home on disability leave, had recovered enough to make daily efforts to seduce every girl he met. A Nashville prostitute cut her hair and joined a Michigan regiment. The mails were flooded with ads for pornographic novels, images, and devices. Another man, perhaps overlooked by the postman, wrote home asking for some “fancy” reading material to revive his dormant sexual feelings. The mail also contained hundreds of family letters of far grimmer content: children dying of diphtheria, measles, smallpox, and tuberculosis, and families turned out in the snow for inability to pay the rent. Some soldiers were sentenced to death for going home to help their starving families. Other letters and court documents tell of a great cavalcade of human mischief, error, misery, and poor judgment. A young girl is sent to prison for incest with her father. A married woman is sued for libel after she claimed a neighbor had offered her “nine pence” to lie with him. A justice of the peace ordered the sheriff to arrest two men for “getting bastards” upon two women. Civil War issues did include battles, politics, and slavery, but there was also a another aspect of life, never mentioned in high school textbooks, of love, lust, venereal disease, incest, abortion, contraception, and harsh language. Even obscene graffiti, written on the walls of Southern mansions, imitated the “art” found in high school bathrooms today. The author’s book, fully referenced and annotated, brings these documents and images, verbatim and uncensored, to a public that would like to know what life was really like in mid-Victorian America.

Love and Lust: Private and Amorous Letters of the Civil War

BookSurge Publishing

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