Introduction
David J. Appleby and Andrew Hopper
Part I: Mortality
1 Battlefields, burials and the English Civil Wars
Ian Atherton
2 Controlling disease in a civil-war garrison town: military discipline or civic duty? The surviving evidence for Newark upon Trent, 1642–46
Stuart B. Jennings
Part II: Medical care
3 A new kind of surgery for a new kind of war: gunshot wounds and their treatment in the British Civil Wars
Stephen M. Rutherford
4 ‘Stout Skippon hath a wound’: the medical treatment of Parliament’s infantry commander following the battle of Naseby
Ismini Pells
5 ‘Dead hogges, dogges, cats and well flayed carryon horses’: royalist hospital provision during the First Civil War
Eric Gruber von Arni
6 Gerard’s Herball and the treatment of war-wounds and contagion during the English Civil War
Richard Jones
Part III: The hidden human costs
7 The third army: wandering soldiers and the negotiation of parliamentary authority, 1642–51
David J. Appleby
8 ‘The deep staines these Wars will leave behind’: psychological wounds and curative methods in the English Civil Wars
Erin Peters
9 The administration of military welfare in Kent, 1642–79
Hannah Worthen
10 ‘To condole with me on the Commonwealth’s loss’: the widows and orphans of Parliament’s military commanders
Andrew Hopper
11 ‘So necessarie and charitable a worke’: welfare, identity and Scottish prisoners of war in England, 1650–55
Chris R. Langley
Conclusion
David J. Appleby and Andrew Hopper
Index

Historians of the British Civil Wars are increasingly taking notice of these bloody conflicts as a critical episode in the welfare history of Europe. Battle-scarred examines the human costs of the conflict and the ways in which they left lasting physical and mental scars after the cessation of armed hostilities. From a wider perspective, it continues the huge advances which have been made in our understanding of the experiences of the common people during this series of conflicts. Its chapters analyse the effectiveness of the provision of medical care, how military welfare operated and the means by which the British peoples endured this traumatic catastrophe.

The book focuses on epidemic disease, mortality, burial, wounds, surgery and hospitals, herbal medicine, desertion and demobilisation, trauma, imprisonment, pensions and charitable collections during wartime. It advances and widens our understanding of the medical history of the Civil Wars through examining details of the soldiers’ wounds and ailments, along with the treatments afforded to them. It also broadens approaches to military history by examining the many ways in which state-sponsored military welfare functioned. Its concern to articulate the experience, agency and self-fashioning of war widows will appeal to historians of women, allowing them to extend their focus beyond the more heavily studied memoirs of the social elite.

This book will be of interest to academics and students alike, and beyond academia it reaches out to Civil War enthusiasts and those interested in the wider history of medicine and welfare.