Medicine In The Civil War Essay

The Civil War is known as a central event in American History. The war was fought between the Union States and the Confederate States from 1861-1865. When people reflect on the Civil War, they often think of victory and defeat. They never bother to go behind the scenes. People that aren’t mentioned in most history textbooks are surgeons.

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.

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.

If you were a soldier in the Battle of Gettysburg do you think that you would’ve survived? The battle between the Union and the Confederacy lasted three days, from July 1, 1863 to July 3, 1863 and in the end the Union was victorious. The Battle of Gettysburg was the bloodiest battle of the Civil War. The medical knowledge and equipment that the surgeons had back then were no match the types of illnesses and injuries that the soldiers had. The people that were that got shot during the Civil War, either had to get a body part amputated, got their gunshot wound covered with a bandage, opened up the wound to get the bullet out and then patch them up. Three people from The Killer Angels that got shot and just got their wound wrapped with bandage were John Buford, Buster Kilrain, and a runaway slave.

With many soldiers dying from disease on the battlefield, the help of medical advances decreased the mortality rate of all soldiers on both sides. Before the medical advances of the Civil War, many soldiers died from wounds and diseases on the battlefield. In fact, for every soldier that died on the battlefield, two soldiers would die of disease. These diseases included some that appeared on the Oregon Trail and the expansion out West, such as dysentery, diarrhea, typhoid, and the dreaded malaria.

The medicine in Civil War was just becoming extremely primitive. Surgeons, doctors, etc never understood that there could be infections and they did very little to prevent these infections from happening. Dover’s Powder was a mixture of ipecac and opium and was not only used to treat pain but also treat severe diarrhea, pneumonia, and bronchitis. Quinine was to treat common deadly diseases and was another common drug at the time that was used to cure diseases such as malaria. Calomel. Hospitals were generally warehouses, churches, barns, or other buildings, but were rarely cleaned at all. The disease that were the soldiers greatest enemy were, Dysentery, Measles, Smallpox, Pneumonia, and

Exposure turned a mild head cold into pneumonia and worsened other conditions. Pneumonia was third ranking on the long list of killer diseases, after typhoid and dysentery. The diet of the Civil War soldier was somewhere between barely palatable to absolutely awful (Adams 1952). “It was estimated that 995 of 1,000 Union troops eventually contracted chronic dysentery” (Adams 1861-1865). Given the atrocious conditions, doctors tried many different cures. To put an end to the common dysentery (which was one of the main worries of soldiers) a plug of opium was given. A mixture of mercury and chalk, which was called “blue mass” by surgeons, was used to treat closed bowels. Respiratory problems, such as pneumonia and bronchitis were treated with a dose of opium or sometimes quinine and “muster plasters” (Schildt 1986). Bleeding, an age old process which included cutting the main arteries and veins open length wise to rid the body of supposed “bad blood,” was also used. Malaria could be treated with quinine, or sometimes even turpentine if quinine was not available. Whiskey and other forms of alcohol were also used to treat wounds and disease, mainly to relieve some pain although not nearly all of it. “The medicines brought in to try and halt diseases were manufactured in the north for the most part; the southerners had to deal with running the Union blockade” (Coco 1995). The medicines the South used were usually smuggled in although they south had some medicine

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.

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

In the South, medical treatment was not a highly sophisticated process. Depletion, the most popular method of care used for patients, included, among other things, draining blood out of the patient to remove impurities and rejuvenate the body. Even people of the south during that time period seemed more sensible than doctors stating, the cure was often equally as fatal as the disease doctors were trying to cure. The qualifications of a doctor were slim, and it showed in the people's view of them and in the treatment methods they provided.

In the Civil War the North had many advantages over the South. The South was outnumbered, out supplied, and pushed into a corner using military tactics. Many things changed because of the Civil War. The military tactics used by the North changed how war was fought from then on. Many changes were made politically; some were only temporary, while others were permanent. After the war was over, the country was reunited and the image of the soul and duty of our country redefined.

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.

The improvement of medicine over the course of the human successes gave great convenience to the people of today. Science has cured and prevented many illnesses from occurring and is on its way to cure some of the most dreadful and harmful illnesses. As the world modernizes due to the industrialization, so does the ways of medicine. Some cures are approached by chance, some, through intense, scientific measures.