Medicine During The Civil War

The most popular out of all the equipment was the amputation saw. Many times, the only way to save a person’s life was through amputation. Surgeons would have to cut off the damaged portion of the body with the amputation saw made out of a steel blade and wooden handle. “Rather than being comfortably anaesthetized, the soldiers had to grit their teeth through the pain of having their limbs amputated.” (Daily Mail)

Many medical procedures and advancements that are used today were discovered during The Civil War and World War I. Without the discoveries in The Civil War and World War I, today we may not have X-rays, anesthesia administration, ambulances, be able to understand and perform blood transfusions or the importance of sterilization today. Because of the advancements from the Civil War in the areas of surgical techniques, treating a patient,

Drugs first surfaced in the United States in the 1800s. After the Civil War opium become very popular and was used medicinally. Following opium was cocaine which was also used as a health remedy but near the end of the 19th century opium and cocaine abuse peaked and local governments began to prohibit opium dens and importation. In 1914 the first federal drug policy, the Harrison Narcotics act, is passed and drugs are no longer seen as harmless remedies. The act aggressively regulated the manufacturing of marijuana, cocaine, heroin, and morphine. During the 50’s more federal drug policies were passed and drugs began to become more criminalized. The 60’s saw a rise in counter-culture and substances such as marijuana and LSD saw widespread use. The demand for drugs skyrocketed in the 1960s. In 1971 President Nixon declared drug abuse America 's number one enemy and proclaimed that we must wave a all out offensive. After President Nixon declared the War on Drugs in 1971, the United States has spent more than a trillion dollars on this failing policy that not only has had no effect on the amount of drugs being used in the United States and has increased the number of people incarcerated on drug charges from just 50,000 to over half a million, but also has helped fuel drug cartels and foment violence and death through overdoses from uncontrolled drug potency and turf wars between street gangs.

Even though there was not any sanitation the chance of survival for stretched then pervious wars. Doctors had medical kits, which included different tool for cutting such as knives, scalpels, bone saws, chain saw, suture and bandages. Thermometers were rarely used. Doctors did have some painkillers, but they were not always given to all soldiers. The most effective were morphine and opium. What happened after the surgery? Soldiers were transported to a hospital by ambulance. Soldiers were normally in horrible pain making the trip almost unbearable to deal with. The greatest risks for soldiers were now 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.

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

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

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, 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.

The Civil War began because of uncompromising differences between free and slave states over the power of government, in April 12, 1861. Most people died in the Civil War because of deadly diseases. The Battle of Gettysburg is considered the most important event in the Civil War. Soldiers fought from July first to July third 1863. Do soldiers really know how to treat an injury during a war? In the book The Killer Angels by Michael Shaara’s published in 1974, we are exposed to historical figures that could have treated their injuries and made them minor if they had modern medicine. With the medical training we have today the figures could have saved their limbs and known how to take better care of themselves in such uncomfortable situations.

In comparison to modern medicine, the techniques used during the Civil War are vastly different than medical measures that are implemented in a medical setting today. Surgeons during the Civil War used sulfuric ether and chloroform as anesthesia. Sulfuric ether was discovered in Europe in the 1830s, and was first used as a anesthetic by William Morton in 1846 (Reimer). Anesthesia was only used in 95% of Civil War surgeries (Reimer). Sulfuric ether and chloroform were administrated by placing the chloroform or sulfuric ether on a sponge at the top of a cone and putting the open end over the nose and mouth (Reimer). This method wasted a lot of the liquid as it evaporated (Reimer). Due to the loss of solution, surgeons used just enough to make

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

Many soldiers once wounded were on a down slope from there but once the ambulance corps was created by Letterman the evacuation of wounded soldiers got easier and faster. Once a soldier was wounded, medical personnel on the battlefield bandaged the soldier as fast as they could, and gave him whiskey and morphine if necessary for the pain (Dixon). Anesthetics were more readily available than most people thought, they were not as affective or regulated as we have now today but this was the start of the use of them. The two most common kind of anesthetics they used in the Civil War was chloroform or ether. Chloroform is a colorless, volatile, liquid derivative of trichloromethane with and ether-like odor (Chloroform). The surgeons would place come on a cloth and press it over the soldier’s mouth until the soldier passed out (Goellnitz). Ether was used before chloroform but was used in the same way. Ether was highly flammable so chloroform was safer to use around candles and open flames as some surgeries would persist into the night. The major risk for chloroform was that if a patient suddenly breathed in too deeply, an overdose of chloroform could case the heart to stop killing the patient (Schroeder-Lein.) Anesthesia was used for much more than just surgery. Some wound cleaning and treatment, such as the use of bromine solution to

At the begin of the Civil War the knowledge about medicine was very small. Numerous soldiers got wounded and the few surgeons there were did multiple amputations and surgeries. To start many surgeon would give the wounded man a drink of liquor, hoping it would counteract the shock and then maybe gave them an opium pill, dust or rubbed morphine onto the wound. Later in the war surgeons used a syringe to inject the morphine. Along with whiskey, chloroform was used to help, it was used in 72.6% of the medical cases the got. In the cases when chloroform was used there was 37 cases that reported that patient died from the chloroform. In some cases anesthetics forms weren’t even administered and surgeon performed amputations on awake patients. Some of the medicine that the surgeons had available was ergot, cotton roots, flax seed, watermelon seeds, olive oil, cardinal flower, and more. Those are common things in life now, so you can see that the medicine that was available and what the surgeons knew during the civil war was so small and it sparked the growth of medicine in the years to

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.