The University of Iowa History of Medicine Society and Hardin Library for the Health Sciences present Professor Leslie Schwalm speaking on Black Bodies, Medical Science, and the Age of Emancipation, Thursday, October 24, 2019 in 1287 Carver Biomedical Research Building.  

Why did the Civil War, which ultimately ended slavery, also see northern whites deeply invested in sustaining racial hierarchies?  How and why do white medical practitioners in the Union army and in northern civilian relief efforts engage in efforts to advance the notion of race as a biological and hierarchical construct?  

White medical practitioners and military officers attempted to document what they believed to be the immutable, hierarchical characteristics of race.  That contradiction–a war for emancipation generating greater belief in medical and scientific racism–challenges our ideas about the consequences of the war and the development of wartime medical science.

Professor Schwalm is a historian of gender and race in the nineteenth-century U.S., and her research focuses on slavery, the Civil War, and emancipation. She is Chair, Gender, Women’s, and Sexuality Studies and with Professor, History.  Profile

Driving? Park at Newton Road Ramp, Newton Road.
Bus? Take Cambus Pentacrest to the Nursing Building or PBDB stop.