Harsh weather, bad water, inadequate shelter in winter quarters, poor policing of camps and dirty camp hospitals took their toll. The department initially had a tremendously difficult time organizing both the volunteer and regular physicians and was inept at managing the new hospitals and training camps. While this portrayal has its merit—United States physicians certainly lagged behind their European counterparts in the medical sciences—it can mislead if taken too far, rendering too stark a juxtaposition between mid-nineteenth-century medicine and the biomedical revolution, born from the laboratory sciences and the germ theory of disease, which followed. As more schools emerged, and competition among the proprietors intensified, it became common practice to reduce medical school requirements. After the , the United States government took possession of several private hospitals in , , and surrounding towns.
The University of North Carolina Press has been a member of the Green Press Initiative since 2003. Physicians developed new ideas as the war progressed, and the thinking of many American physicians coalesced around a new understanding of American medical science. Infection occurred for a variety of reasons. I actually lived up the street from the Vicary House, in Freedom, Pennsylvania. I am lucky to have him in my corner and dedicate this book to him. I am appreciative to the groups that have listened to my talks and indebted to the many people whose perceptive questions and comments I had not anticipated in my work.
While anatomy was the cornerstone of medical training in antebellum America, most American Protestants refused to see the dead body in medical terms. The Confederate government appropriated money to purchase hospitals to serve the army, and the development of field services began after the. I would like to thank the staff at the National Archives and Records Administration in Washington, D. Two Confederate Hospitals and Their Patients, Atlanta to Opelika Mercer University Press, 2005 183 pp. This is a convincing book, well researched and written engagingly and enthusiastically. During this time, there were two main methods of amputation, the flap method and circular method. I am deeply indebted to him for his advice and constructive suggestions and thank him for giving me the benefit of his extensive knowledge of nineteenth-century medicine.
During the first year of the conflict, ranking medical officers routinely noted how difficult it was to organize and instill authority among many of the medical practitioners. ¹³ There were also some improvements in the East Coast hospitals—particularly in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia—which facilitated ideas on the progress of medical science. There were no standardized tests, and a college education, or even literacy, was not a requirement. In particular I would like to thank Mark Harrison, Geoff Hudson, Michael Flannery, Sanders Marble, Bill Rothstein, Todd Savitt, Michael Bliss, John Harley Warner, Eva Ahrén, Jeffrey Baker, Mindy Schwartz, and especially, Michael Sappol. All this well fitted the objectives of the commission, whose express purpose was to avoid delay and circumlocution for the purpose of accomplishing efficiency and directness of action. Letterman's system was so efficient that all wounded soldiers at The Battle of Antietam were removed from the battlefield and sent to care within one day so this new system saved thousands of Union lives. From the beginning of the war, doctors managed the catastrophic wounds of battle, but an equally important objective of their practice was to arrive at new understandings of and ways of coping with the unfamiliar diseases that abounded in the camps and hospitals as the war raged well past the prophesied three months.
In fact, the crucial social changes in American medicine predated the influence of these physicians. I actually lived up the street from the Vicary House, in Freedom, Pennsylvania. It was the responsibility of the regimental surgeons to determine which soldiers could return to duty and which should be sent to the general hospitals. I realized I was looking at the long version sometimes ten or more pages of the few lines that had been synthesized and published in the Medical and Surgical History. After all, before the war many southern physicians had traveled abroad to study medicine or studied in the leading centers in the North including Boston, Philadelphia, and New York.
You can understand everything you want by a reserve. These were case histories that accompanied medical and surgical specimens and the results of autopsies. Though the war's human toll was tragic, conducting postmortems on the dead and caring for the wounded gave physicians ample opportunity to study and develop new methods of treatment and analysis, from dissection and microscopy to new research into infectious disease processes. D1, D4, although the casualty reporting may not be comparable. It set in motion forces that would improve medicine nationwide and enable great medical leaps in the subsequent decades. There were two types of amputations, primary and secondary.
With an insufficient number of ambulances performing assigned tasks, the wounded looked to their comrades to carry them to safety and in essence this removed many soldiers from the battlefield. New estimates of the Civil War death toll, and how those men died, seem to support this impression. Keen years after the conflict, seems to confirm the impression of Civil War medicine. Many physicians realized early on that their limited knowledge of the body and disease was inadequate to care for the thousands of patients created by the war. These men served in the initial makeshift regimental hospitals.
² More Americans, in fact, died during the Civil War than in all other major wars combined,³ and two-thirds of these deaths were due to diseases like gangrene, pyemia, tetanus, diarrhea, and dysentery, some of which followed from wounds suffered in the war and others from unsanitary conditions. At first, then, I was impressed with the high number of autopsies recorded in the war but not with the detail of the autopsies. Hammond became Union Surgeon General in April 1862, one of his first acts was the issuance of Circular No. I was at first surprised at how long, detailed, and analytical many of the case reports were. Americans had only a few years earlier read about the similar disastrous medical care of British soldiers during the Crimean War in American newspapers, medical journals, and pamphlets and were well aware of the importance of effective medical care, sanitation, proper diet, and medical treatment. Finally, the boundaries of this book should be mentioned. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Devine, Shauna, author.
Doctors in blue: the medical history of the Union Army in the Civil War. Nearly two-thirds of the Civil War's approximately 750,000 fatalities were caused by disease--a staggering fact for which the American medical profession was profoundly unprepared. The flap method was more likely than the circular method to lead to gangrene, as the deep muscle tissue suffered from lack of circulation. The divisional hospitals were established at a safe distance from battlefields where patients could be safely helped after transport from the regimental or brigade hospitals. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.