Civil War Medicine

1. Civil War Medicine By Rebecca Tune, Katy Szendrey, and Guadalupe Garcia

2. The knowledge of doctors during the Civil War • Doctors during the Civil War did not understand infections and did very little to keep it from happening. • The doctors were not use to cleaning off their instruments because there was no antiseptics available to them. • The doctors did not have the proper knowledge of amputation and other medical techniques because they were not things that the average doctor had to deal with. Most Civil War doctors learned about war wounds and treatments such as amputation in this book called “The Practice of Surgery” by Daniel Cooper.

3. Tools Used by Civil War Doctors Civil War doctors had lots of tools that were effective to treating injuries. They had amputation instruments, dissecting instruments, eye and throat instruments. They just about had an instrument for every part of the body. Most instrument sets came in case which doctors called kits. This is an Amputation kit that would have been used in the Civil War. This is a kit for operating on human bones that Civil War doctors used.

4. Sanitation During the Civil War • Sanitation during the Civil War got out of hand. Of coarse when your going into a war you know that people are going to die, but in the Civil War for every man that died due to war, another two men died of disease. • These diseases included dysentery, diarrhea, typhoid, and malaria. • Disease and infection were caused by a few factors: 1. The lack of knowledge doctors had on infection. 2. The lack of antiseptics available to doctors. 3. The military hospitals were dirty and not well-ventilated.

5. Taking A Stand For Civil War Sanitation Average people saw the need for better sanitation in the Civil War. They put together care packages for soldiers in the war. They also collected goods and fundraised items for the troops. These efforts from the citizen eventually turned into something bigger when Americans saw how they too could help with the war without actually fighting. They then formed the U. S. Sanitary Commission on June 9, 1861. The Department of General Relief embraced the work done by the U. S. Sanitation Commission. They took on the duty of supplying food, clothing, bandages, hospital furniture and medicines for the wounded at war. The Preventive Service also helped by sending medical inspectors to the camps to check for sanitation.

6. Painkillers during the Civil War • While most people think that did not use anesthetics during the Civil War, they actually did. • Confederate surgeons used them more than Union surgeons. • There about 80,000 amputation cases were the use of anesthetics was recorded. • In some cases a patient was given a shot of whiskey and a bullet to bite on for his amputation.