Hospital Sketches

In November 1862, Louisa May Alcott (1832–1888) signed up as a volunteer nurse for the Sanitary Commission charged with caring for the Civil War’s mounting casualties. From 13 December 1862 until 21 January 1863, Miss Alcott served at the Union Hotel Hospital in Georgetown in the District of Columbia, where she ultimately contracted typhoid and pneumonia and very nearly died. This book is her account of her journey south from Concord and her six weeks in the nation’s wartime capital. Styling herself by the fanciful name “Tribulation Periwinkle,” she brought humor as well as pathos to her subject, making this first-hand account of the absolute horrors of a 19th-century war hospital seem less shocking and more appreciative of the sacrifices being made by the wounded warriors and their families.

From the Chronicle of the Capinovo Monastery "St. Nicolai Wonderworker"

The subject of this study is the chronicle of the Kapinovo monastery "St. Nicolai the Wonderworker". The royal monastery was founded in 1272 with the patronage of King Constantine Tych-Assen. It is one of the oldest and largest Bulgarian monasteries. During the Ottoman rule, it was pillaged, devastated and set ablaze by kardzhalii (turkish outlaws). It was rebuilt twice in 1835 and 1856. During the Revival it was a significant spiritual, enlightenment and revolutionary center. It is closely linked to the struggles for an independent church, nationwide education and political freedom. In 1830 a monastery school was founded there. Freedom fighters sougters refuge in the monastery: Velchova plot 1835, Captain Dyado Nikola's uprising 1856, Hadji Stavreva rebellion 1862. Under the Russo-Turkish wars (1877-1878) the monastery shelters refugees from the town of Elena, which was burned down by the Turks in November 1877. A Russian military infirmary for the wounded warriors was also organized. Lientenant Colonel Georgi Ulagai and 32 Russian soldiers are buried in the yard of the monastery. Four monks from the holy cloister have reached the pinnacles of hierarchical service by being elected bishops. The monastery is seen as a fortress of Bulgarian spirituality and guardian of our cultural and historical heritage. Keywords: Kapinovo Monastery "St. Nicolai the Wonderworker", Independent Church, Abbot, Revolutionary Center, Bishop, Russo-Turkish Wars (1877-1878), Russian Military Infirmary, Refugees

War-Worn Subjects

This chapter explores how humility and autonomy come into play for “wounded warriors” seeking post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) treatment and for the medical professionals treating them within the particular constraints of the military-medical complex. Analyzing military PTSD illustrates how deeply entangled disease construction, diagnosis, and “cure” are with the complex discourse of “choice and control,” or with medicalization under the pressures of neoliberal rationality. Like with birth and death, but perhaps even more so, veteran PTSD as taken up within the Veterans Health Administration is a site of subjection and potential contestation from which we can learn much about the production of citizen-subjectivity in moments of distinct corporeal and psychic vulnerability. This chapter examines how militarism and masculinity conspire with inadequate conceptions of patient (and doctor) humility and autonomy, to produce an assumption of and fatalism about whether “wounded warriors” can be “fixed.”

Wounded Warriors of the Future Disability Hierarchy in Avatar and Source Code

The article analyzes the representation of disabled veterans in James Cameron’s Avatar and Duncan Jones’s Source Code. The argument is that these two films use the figure of the heroic, technologically enhanced, white disabled veteran man to alleviate cultural anxieties, fears, and guilt about veterans and disabled people in the contemporary United States. In doing so, however, Avatar and Source Code perpetuate a disability hierarchy that reinforces a variety of oppressive cultural norms. The article, therefore, demonstrates how the films reflect the differential valuation and treatment of different kinds of disabled people in American culture at large via the genre of science fiction and its technological imaginative possibilities.