"Brian Craig Miller provides medical history of the procedure, looks at men who rejected amputation, and examines how Southern men and women adjusted their ideas about honor, masculinity, and love in response to the presence of large numbers of amputees during and after the war. While some historians have explored the lives of the wounded, disabled and amputated soldiers throughout the major military conflicts of the twentieth century, few monographs have returned to a time when medical care remained primitive at best in American history: the Civil War... In his travels in the South over the past five years, Miller has combed through archives, producing a wealth of surgical and medical manuals, hospital records, surgeons reports, diary, letter and journal entries pertaining to amputation, legislative records, pension files and applications, newspaper reports and numerous anecdotes about what it means to lose a limb."--Provided by publisher.

Introduction: Empty sleeves in Civil War history and memory -- The surgeons : gray anatomy -- The patients : enduring the "fearfulest test" of manhood -- The women : reconstructing Confederate manhood -- The return : adjusting to dependency and disability -- The state : the politics of paying damages -- Epilogue -- Appendix A: Amputation statistics -- Appendix B: Prosthetic limb programs -- Appendix C: Pension programs.