Summary: Finally Free!,Today we commemorate the emancipation of our ancestors with joyful celebrations called Juneteenth. Thousands of Freed Slaves seized the chance to legally walk away from the plantation that held then for generations, migrating as never before. But in their journey to freedom, they also encountered yellow fever, smallpox, cholera, dysentery, malnutrition, starvation, and exposure. WHY!?? WHAT does this reveal about Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, and it's TRUE intent? READ. In "Sick From Freedom" our guest James Downs recounts the measures the US government took to address this crisis:The Medical Division which hired more than 120 physicians, establishing some forty underfinanced and understaffed hospitals scattered throughout the South, largely in response to medical emergencies. Downs shows that the goal of the Medical Division was to promote a healthy workforce, an aim which often excluded a wide range of freed people,including women, the elderly, the physically disabled, and children. Downs concludes by tracing how the Reconstruction policy was then implemented in the American West, where it was also disastrously applied to Native Americans. In this interview we will analyze the widespread medical calamity sparked by emancipation, the clearly convoluted intentions of the Lincoln administration in an over looked episode of the Civil War and its aftermath, poignantly revealed in "Sick from Freedom" Get The Book HERE!
