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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Civil War Medicine. (2014, 02 16). Retrieved from ehistory: http://ehistory.osu.edu/uscw/features/medicine/cwsurgeon/introduction.cfm
Civil War Medicine and the RCH. (2014, 03 12). Retrieved from Rochester General Health System: http://www.rochestergeneral.org/about-us/rochester-general-hospital/about-us/rochester-medical-museum-and-archives/online-exhibits/civil-war-medicine-and-the-rochester-city-hospital/
Medical Talk. (2014, 03 23). Retrieved from National Park Service: http://www.nps.gov/wicr/forteachers/upload/Medical-Tools-for-teachers.pdf
Medicine in the Civil War. (2014, 02 16). Retrieved from University of Toledo: http://www.utoledo.edu/library/canaday/exhibits/quackery/quack8.html
Minie Ball. (2014, 02 16). Retrieved from Kentucky Historical Society: http://www.ket.org/artstoolkit/statedivided/gallery/resources/minieball/minieball_more.pdf
To make matters worse they had to deal with smallpox more dangerously than that is Lice because they rarely bathed or washed themselves or had laundered clothing. Another horrible things that Martin and his soldiers had to deal with was typhus a potential killer disease characterized by usually high fevers and red sports on the skin. Typhus took the lives of most of the Valley Forge Martin was under the brigade command of General James M. Varnum but his actual commander was Colonial John Durkee of the 4th Connecticut regiment, since Varnum was elsewhere. Washington’s continentals fairly well- supplied with food, but in the months preceding a major reason for so much privation at Valley Forge. Martin’s statement about Washington’s main army was misleading about them residing in the White Plains as they crossed the Hudson River and established winter quarters in Middlebrooks, New
In document “A” which is from various says at Valley Forge in December 23, 1777 2,898 soldiers were counted ill. Later at Valley Forge in February 1, 1778 3,989 soldiers were counted ill. Also from various sources between December and June 1,800 to 2,500 soldiers died due to illnesses. Imagine you being one of those ill soldiers in cold and snowy Philadelphia.
As a result, many diseases found their way to the camps. These diseases include “typhus, tuberculosis, typhoid fever, and dysentery.” (ushmm.org) Typhus, a disease that causes severe headache, diarrhea, and extreme mental confusion, killed thousands of people at this camp.” (Ayer, H. Eleanor, p. 68) Eventually, a majority of the prisoners suffered from typhus “as it got spread through body lice.”
The living conditions in the camp were rough. The prisoners were living in an overcrowded pit where they were starved. Many people in the camp contracted diseases like typhus and scarlet fever. Commonly, the prisoners were beaten or mistreated by
From 1861 to 1865 our nation's deadliest conflict was being disputed. The American Civil War had more Americans die than in the American Revolution, the War of 1812, the Mexican War, the Spanish-American War, World Wars I and II, the Korean War, Vietnam and the Persian Gulf War combined. ( Ballou) Approximately 600,000 soldiers and 100,000 civilians died. Of all these casualties, three-fourths died from wound infections or infectious diseases. ( Ballou) About 10 million soldiers became ill at some point during the civil war. A huge reason for this is because many men came from small towns and isolated farms. Individuals had never been exposed to disease. This resulted in millions of soldiers getting sick. ( Morris ) Of all the many different diseases that were going on duri...
Soldiers faced diseases like measles, small pox, malaria, pneumonia, camp itch, mumps, typhoid and dysentery. However, diarrhea killed more soldiers than any other illness. There were many reasons that diseases were so common for the causes of death for soldiers. Reasons include the fact that there were poor physicals before entering the army, ignorance of medical information, lack of camp hygiene, insects that carried disease, lack of clothing and shoes, troops were crowded and in close quarters and inadequate food and water.
In 1865 before an operation, he cleansed a leg wound first with carbolic acid, and performed the surgery with sterilized (by heat) instruments. The wound healed, and the patient survived. Prior to surgery, the patient would need an amputation. However, by incorporating these antiseptic procedures in all of his surgeries, he decreased postoperative deaths. The use of antiseptics eventually helped reduce bacterial infection not only in surgery but also in childbirth and in the treatment of battle wounds.
One of the biggest problems was sanitation. Clean water for drinking and bathing was rare and illness from poor hygiene or contaminated water was very common. Most of the camps were in tight groups and contagious diseases such as chickenpox, colds or the flu would spread over camp within
Disease was always something on the emigrants mind when traveling the Oregon trail, because they never knew when a friend or themselves would succumb to it. According to the Frontier trails, an estimated 50,000 people died from disease (Underwood). The emigrants of the oregon trail had to live through the fact knowing disease could strike at any time and claim another victim. It was hard for the colonists to deal with disease, they had a hard time telling which one it was and often required loads of work to help heal them. According to the National Parks Service, the most common disease were cholera, dysentery, mountain fever, measles, food poisoning, smallpox, and pneumonia (Death and Danger along the Trails). As one can see, the colonists had a hard time figuring out what beast they were fighting, and how to fight it, which is why they ost so many lives. As one can see, the colonists had a hard time figuring out what beast they were fighting, and how to fight it, which is why they lost so many
Here at the Chelsea Naval Hospital, the influx of patients arriving home from the war inflicted with "battle wounds and mustard gas burns," has created a shortage of physicians and it is becoming increasingly difficult to fight this influenza. Even our own physicians are falling ill from the disease and dying within hours of its onset. Today I received a letter from Dr. Roy, a friend and fellow physician at Camp Devens, who describes a similar situation:
In the early years of the Civil War it became clear that disease would be the greatest killer. Twice as many Civil War soldiers died of disease then that were killed in combat. This was due to unsanitary and filthy conditions, untrained Medical personnel and poor medical examination of new soldier’s. One fact from the Civil War was 315,000 soldiers died from illnesses that included: 44,558 from diarrhea/dysentery, 10,063 from malaria, 34,833 from typhoid, 958 from typhus and 436 from yellow fever.
Civil War During the American Civil War, which lasted from 1861-1865, over 620,000 accounted soldiers were killed. Known as the "the first modern war", historians generally agree that the reason for this was because this was a time of transition for the military. Armies and Navies were still using tactics where they would gather large forces of firepower to bear on the enemy. At the same time, weapons were being developed which were accurate and lethal well beyond any arms of the earlier conflicts.
Living conditions in these camps were absolutely horrible. The amount of people being kept in one space, amongst being unsanitary, was harsh on the body.
In 1850, a document called the Fugitive Slave Act was passed. Primarily, this document dealt with the reclaiming of runaway slaves. This law allowed southerners to call upon the federal government to capture runaway slaves who had fled the South and may be living in the North. The Fugitive Slave Act and the laws that went with it only caused controversy in the North. This split the North and South. In reaction to this, some northern states passed laws forbidding state officials to enforce the Fugitive Slave Law, which only angered the southern states. Northerners had become aware of the hypocrisy of slavery and became resolved to end slavery. Many abolitionists started to take action to help slaves escape. This major controversy over the runaway slaves sparked the beginning of the Civil War.
During the Civil War they really worked towards building more hospitals and it drove the nursing profession to grow and have a large demand for nurses, but they were more like volunteers, such as wives or mistresses who were following their soldier men. Being a war nursing at that time was seen as a job for the lower class and no “respectable” woman could be seen in a military hospital. During the Civil War Phoebe Levy Pember, a young widow, went north to the confederate capital of Richmond. She eventually ran the world’s largest hospital, where on an average day she would supervise the treatment of 15,000 patients who were cared for by nearly 300 slave women. The war then led to a greater respect for nurses which was noticed by Congress. They then passed a bill providing pensions to Civil War nurses, but more importantly this led to the profe...