Essay On The Importance Of Medical Surgery During The Civil War

When people picture the Civil War amputations, they often picture piles of limps stacked around a battlefield and a surgeon as a butcher. However, this picture is not true to the real nature of battlefield medicine. Amputation was the most common surgery throughout the Civil War. The Civil War leads to advancement in amputation and quality of life for those who had amputation. Artificial limbs also came into the picture helping former soldiers lead a better quality life.

The medicines and medical techniques used during the Civil War were very primitive for their time. Extremely little was known about germs and the dangers of infections. In Recovery, it is stated that, “Treating wounds and illnesses with medication had become common—opiates, stimulants, sedatives, diuretics, purgatives, and more were widely available and used. The first pills had been made in the early 1800s. The stethoscope and the

John Burford, a Brigadier General, had received a bullet to the knee during the Second Battle of Manassas. Luckily Buford’s bullet wound wasn’t too serious. If the wound had been serious, it would have been treated with amputations and since there were no anesthetics back then, the person getting amputated on would feel all the pain. Surgeries during the Civil War were performed unsanitary. Surgeons would not wash their hands before operating and would wear blood splattered clothing. The instruments used for operating were never disinfected properly. Instead, they would dip their instruments in cold water, often bloody from the prior operation. Buford had died in December 1863 of

World War I was a war of innovation with new artillery and tactics, but also a deadly war in which approximately ten million soldiers died in or injuries sustained from battle. As injuries increased throughout the war, the need for medical assistance was constantly growing. Surgery is considered an art and like art, it evolved and new techniques were developed, making an injury that could kill someone survivable. For instance, in the Civil War most surgeons would immediately amputate and in World War I surgeons began trying much harder to save limbs. Blood transfusion allowed surgeons to reduce patient death from blood loss because of the ample supply of blood from fellow soldiers. Sanitation improvements led to fewer deaths from infection

The Civil War had a tremendous death toll. In fact, it had more deaths than any of the previous wars combined. At the time, it was thought that the soldiers in battle died from the wounds or amputations they received. The true cause of death came from disease. These harsh conditions were contributed by unqualified doctors and non-sterile equipment. During the Civil War, the true issue was not only the wounds received in battle but the infectious diseases that ultimately led to the soldier’s death. When this was discovered, doctors knew some action needed to take place. Hospitals and sanitation standards were improved. The Civil War contributed to an evolution of medicine and how to combat victims plagued with disease.

On April 12, 1861 in Fort Sumter, SC Confederate troops fired the first shots of the Four Year American Civil War. After the first few battles were fought, both sides faced the realization of how they desperately needed doctors and nurses to care for the injured soldiers. (1) The first nurses were recuperating soldiers (rebel) however; their own illnesses prevented them from providing proper care or returning to full military duties. These soldiers resented being appointed hospital duty. (2)

During the Civil War, medicine was an important aspect for every soldier due to the fact that many soldiers had to fight and ended up with injuries also there were many types of illnesses. In this essay, I will focus on the advance of medicine during the Civil War. Also how the soldiers and civilians were treated as well as how sanitize their location was, are questions I will try to answer. Also, I will like to include some of most known causes of deaths during the Civil War and the types of diseases that soldiers would come in contact with. Include who was in charge of the hospitals during the war. I will also include information from letters and documents that the nurse and doctors wrote while the Civil War was going one and what kind of establishments were created and the kind of equipment they used in the hospital. Since the period of the Civil War was and is consider to be the start and growth of the medical industry it is important for me to find out why.

During the Civil War, they had to have many medicines, operations, and surgeries done to themselves or others in order to survive (Jenny Goellnitz, Paragraph 1). Some of these medicines we still use today. Medical technology and scientific knowledge have changed dramatically since the Civil War, but the basic principles of military health care remain the same. The deadliest thing that faced the Civil War soldier was disease. For every soldier who died in battle, two died from disease.

In all my years of medicine, being a surgeon in the middle of a Civil War, wasn’t fun. I had more than five men bleeding their lives out and in agonizing pain. What can one surgeon do with only forceps, a cutting saw, and bandages ? Not much and to think, these soldiers still kept fighting and killing one another, so really… how barbaric can these bloody angels get? It was 1863, the South wanted to keep slavery alive, whereas the North wanted to abolish it.

When Walt Whitman wrote that he believed the "real war" would never get into the books, this is the side he was talking about (Belferman 1996). Yet, it is important that we remember and recall the medical side of the conflict too, as horrible and terrifying as it was (Adams 1952). Long before doctors and people knew anything about bacteria and what caused disease was the time of Civil War medicine. Doctors during the Civil War (always referred to as "surgeons") were incredibly unprepared. Most surgeons had as little as two years of medical school because very few pursued further education. At that time, Harvard Medical School did not even own a single stethoscope or microscope until well after the

The nineteenth century held one of the most medically appalling wars, as well as one of the most medically innovative wars. The Civil war is considered a terrible time period for medical equipment as well as surgeons. Many soldiers who had been fighting in the Civil War were killed by sicknesses including diarrhea and pneumonia. Surgeons, who had minimum medical experience, were taking care of the wounded soldiers at the time. The idea of sanitizing and sterilizing equipment that was used on a patient beforehand was not known by the inexperienced surgeons. Only a few years later came the Spanish-American war, which showed a vast improvement in the medical field. During the Spanish-American War many important inventions were created. These include the invention of the x-ray, the discovery of the germ theory, and the discovery of the antiseptic method. Both of these discoveries made it much easier for Surgeons to operate on the wounded soldiers. Another beneficial factor that made the Spanish-American War more medically advanced then the civil war was the service of female nurses. The Nurses provided a lot of help for the surgeons at times when there was a lot of work, and assistance was needed. It is clear that the medicinal techniques used during the Civil War were much less advanced than those used during the Spanish American War.

A. Plan of Investigation This investigation will assess the impact of amputations on the American Civil War from 1861 to 1865. The practice of amputations during the Civil War is perceived as a failure due to the high amount of casualties, uneducated practitioners, and attitudes towards medicine, but there were also limited successes in the practice of amputations. Primary documents and individuals directly involved in the conflict will be investigated to determine the impact of amputations during the conflict to analyze the arguments. Also, statistics and historians’ interpretations will be examined to analyze impact of amputations and different perspectives.

The Civil War was fought with much carnage, and was one of America’s most ‘uncivilized’, wars with a soldier’s chance of survival about twenty-five per cent. While many were killed by other soldiers, usually through bullets, a large portion died as a result of disease such as: dysentery, mumps, pneumonia, typhoid fever, measles, and tuberculosis, diseases that are curable today. These diseases were spread through the horribly sanitized camps found on both sides of the war: Confederate and Union. And while many died from disease, some died from other soldiers’ bullets; these deaths may have been prevented if the technology, or overall techniques used by surgeons, during this time period were more up-to-date, as amputations were the main procedure

In 1864, there were many bloody casualties that occurred. Out of 11,000 physicians that worked in the war, only 500 of them had done surgery before the war had taken place. About 70% of the men they took care of had very extreme wounds.

Although most people would not object to the idea that diseases played some sort of role in the Civil War, few truly realize the extent of their influence. As it was stated previously, diseases affected the Northern soldiers and the Southern soldiers in different ways and to different extents. Those differences will be examined later in this paper. There are some issues relating to diseases, however, that affected soldiers in general, not particularly one side of the war. Those factors will be observed here.