University of New Mexico Health Sciences Center
![Saber Wounds of the Head [Lithograph]](http://hsc.unm.edu/library/spc/archives_month/images/CivilWarMed/SaberWoundsa.jpg)
Much of the knowledge of Civil War military medical practices and logistics relies on the six volumes of cases, reports, statistics, drawings, and photographs found in The Medical and Surgical History of the War of the Rebellion, 1861-1865, published by the Surgeon General’s office in the 1870s and 1880s. The three medical and three surgical volumes contain thousands of pages which include disease prevalence, morbidity, and mortality statistics [Table XIII], treatment plans, a drug formulary, and detailed case excerpts. Based on a series of mandatory reports, the books detail Union health care and conditions in the field and in the military hospitals. [Valverde NM]
Battle wounds were responsible for one third of reported deaths during the Civil War. Saber and bayonet wounds accounted for about two percent of all wounds, but most were not fatal.
![Excised head and three inches of shaft of humerus. Spec. 1730. [Sketch]](images/CivilWarMed/Humerus1.jpg)
Union statistics show that seventy-one percent of gunshot wounds were in the extremities. Limb amputation was the most common surgical procedure—approximately 180,000—undertaken by military surgeons. [Amputations] More than one third of all amputees died after surgery. Union mortality from gunshot wounds of the chest was 62 percent and from wounds of the abdomen was 87 percent.
However, for a Civil War combatant, disease was deadlier than battle. For every soldier who died in battle, two died of disease. Disease was so prevalent that healthy regiments were suspected of falsifying sick reports and often were inspected. Soldiers faced outbreaks of measles, smallpox, malaria, and camp itch. In 1864, the 6th Minnesota Regiment went from 937 battle ready men to 79 in a matter of a few weeks from malaria contracted in Arkansas
Typhoid, dysentery, and pneumonia were the leading killer diseases. However, often the cure was worse than the disease. Treatments included the use of opium, mercury, turpentine, and alcohol.
|
Extract from the Report of
Surgeon Allen F. Peck, Many of the cases of diarrhœa and dysentery were caused by intemperance in some form, although the weather has been such as to favor the production of this class of diseases, the days having been quite warm and the night cold. In the treatment of diarrhœa I find half an ounce of castor oil with
half a drachm of oil of turpentine, administered at once, produces
very happy results; and half an ounce of sulphate of magnesia, with
mucilaginous drinks and a bland diet, answered very well in the
cases of dysentery. In cases of either disease which were not
checked by these simple remedies, I used small doses of some
mercurial, or acetate of lead, combined with enough Dover’s powder
or opium to quiet pain. |
When the Civil War began in 1861, the United States Army numbered 13,000 men. The Army medical staff was 90 doctors who had no experience with large scale medical and logistical problems.
When the Civil War ended in 1865, more than 11,000 doctors had served or were serving on the Army Medical Staff. Field ambulances, and hospitals, medical trains and hospital ships were used to triage, transport and care for soldiers wounded in battle. At war’s end, the total Union and Confederate dead from wounds and disease numbered more than 624,000.
In addition to the extensive clinical and statistical information, more than 1000 engravings, and hundreds of chromolithographs and tinted lithographs illustrate tissue and bone samples [tissue], examples of amputations, battle field layouts [Shiloh], and drawings of equipment and instruments [Instruments]. The volumes provide a comprehensive overview of the medicine of the time and the human costs of war. They are a window on the world of the 19th century.
![Gunshot Wound of Thorax and Abdomen, with Hernia of the Lung [Lithograph]](images/CivilWarMed/Abdomen_Wound.jpg)
National Museum of Civil War Medicine
National Museum of Health & Medicine
The Society of Civil War Surgeons
Air War College Military Medicine
U.S. Army Office of Medical History
ARMY HISTORICAL SERIES: THE ARMY MEDICAL DEPARTMENT 1818-1865
LIFE and DEATH in the WAR ZONE
Civil War medicine, 1861-1865, by C. Keith Wilbur
Orthopaedic injuries of the Civil War: an atlas of orthopaedic injuries and treatments during the Civil War, by Julian E. Kuz and Bradley P. Bengtson
The face of mercy: a photographic history of medicine at war, created and produced by Matthew Naythons ; prologue, William Styron; narrative, Sherwin B. Nuland
Disease in the Civil War; natural biological warfare in 1861-1865, by Paul E. Steiner
Physician-generals in the Civil War; a study in nineteenth mid-century American medicine, by Paul E. Steiner
Civil War medicine, by Stewart Brooks
Medicines for the Union Army; the United States Army laboratories during the Civil War, by George Winston Smith
The School of medicine and the Civil War, by Alan C. Davis ...[et al.]
Doctors in blue; the medical history of the Union Army in the Civil War, by George Worthington Adam
