Your browser does not support the audio element. Listen to a recorded reading of this page:.Take a ten question quiz about this page.In 1886, twenty years after the Civil War, the U.S.She became the first woman to earn the Congressional Medal of Honor. The horrors of wound infection and amputation were reported in the words of. The only woman to work as a doctor during the war was Mary Walker. Nine of the 192 Union military hospitals during the Civil War circulated newspapers edited and printed by convalescents.Around 75% of amputee soldiers survived the operation.Because they were so good at performing amputations, doctors were nicknamed "sawbones".Interesting Facts about Civil War Medicine Medicine would advance significantly over the next several years, but it was too late for those wounded during the Civil War. While medicine had not advanced much since the middle ages, weapons had become very proficient at killing and causing horrible wounds. The era of the Civil War was a time when weapons were far more advanced than medicine. They died from a variety of diseases including dysentery, typhoid, malaria, and tuberculosis. Of the 620,000 soldiers who died during the Civil War, around 400,000 of them died from disease and not from fighting. They assisted the doctors, dressed wounds, and helped to feed the wounded. Thousands of women on both sides of the war volunteered to work as nurses in the hospitals. Doctors generally used drugs such as chloroform or ether to sedate patients before amputation. They became very proficient at amputation.įortunately, there were some forms of anesthesia at the time. This was the main type of surgery that doctors performed. The wounded arm, leg, or finger would just be cut off. Drawing from real stories of the Seminary Hospital, these lessons explore the experiences of surgeons, nurses, and wounded soldiers as they faced mass casualty. Many soldiers became sick and died from infections.īecause there weren't any antibiotics to help cure infections, the only real treatment for wounds was amputation. There were no antibiotics like Penicillin at the time, either. Due to the poor sanitary conditions of the hospitals and the doctors, many wounds became horribly infected. The biggest concern for the wounded was infection. They didn't wash their hands or clean their medical instruments between surgeries. Doctors were unaware of how diseases spread. Many of the doctors serving during the Civil War had very little training and the training they did receive wasn't very good. Sometimes there wasn't enough room for all the wounded and they were just lined up on the ground outside. They quickly became dirty places full of disease and suffering. They were typically set up in barns or homes nearby the battlefield. The last place any soldier wanted to end up was in a Civil War field hospital.Ĭivil War field hospitals were horrible places. However, this was not the case at all during the Civil War. After all, they would be able to relax in a nice clean hospital and get looked after by expert doctors instead of fighting. You may think that some Civil War soldiers were glad to get wounded. 20 years later, doctors began to understand that invisible micro-organisms were responsible for infection, and wound care greatly improved.American Civil War Civil War Medicine History > Civil War In 1863, some doctors were injecting bromine into wounds, with positive results. As the war continued to claim thousands of lives, doctors and nurses began to experiment with new methods to fight infection. The "germ theory" of disease had not yet been established, and surgeons often operated with unwashed hands and dirty medical equipment. Even the smallest wound could develop a deadly infection. Wound infection was common during the US Civil War. It was located on the National Mall in Washington, DC, at the intersection now occupied by the Smithsonian National Air & Space Museum. The Armory Square Hospital provided care to wounded soldiers from 1862-1865.
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