The Civil War and Infectious Diseases

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When the Civil War began in April 1861, people knew nothing about infections and what the cause of infections was. The monumental amount of wounded soldiers presented challenges for the naive medical field. A total of 620,000 soldiers died during the Civil War from combat, starvation, and from disease (Civil War Facts, 2014). For every soldier who died in combat, two others died of disease. The reason was due to unsanitary and filthy conditions, untrained and unprepared medical staff. Medical boards were approving inadequate students due to the demand of help needed to treat wounded soldiers. Most Civil War physicians had only treated colds and sore throats prior to the war. Many of the physicians had never treated a gunshot wound or preformed a surgical procedure until the war. The risk of surgery was tremendous, due to the high rates of post-surgical infection. Unsanitary hospitals and camps housed the wounded soldiers all in the same area, which was a breeding ground for infections and the spread of diseases.
Soldiers from rural areas were not immune to childhood diseases such as mumps, measles and chickenpox’s. This would result in a camp having an outbreak of measles. Soldiers faced other various diseases such as malaria, camp itch, typhoid and dysentery. Malaria which is a disease that can cause a high fever was brought into the camps by mosquitos. Conditions around the camp were damp and dark, which made it a breeding ground for mosquitos. The single greatest killer of soldiers was Dysentery. Dysentery is a severe form of diarrhea. According to the Civil War Academy, a total of 95,000 soldiers, 50,000 confederate and 45,000 union soldiers died from Dysentery (Civil War Diseases, 2014). Typhoid fever aka “camp fever” was t...

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