Psychologists working with the federally-funded database of Civil War records called the Early Indicators of Later Work Levels, Disease, and Death Project, have discovered evidence of health and mental problems among veterans of the American Civil War, what physicians of the day characterized as "Irritable Heart" and similar to what we today call post traumatic stress syndrome. This paper, published in the Archives of General Psychiatry last month, is a terrific example of what you can with the Early Indicators database of historic records, paid for in part by American tax dollars and free to anybody interested in them. The photograph is of wounded soldiers being tended in the field after the Battle of Chancellorsville near Fredericksburg, Va., May 2, 1863, negative number 111-B-349, and available with a raft of others at the National Archives website.
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