Medicine during the American Civil War
My 2nd Great Grandfather, Wm F. WARWICK, was born 11 August 1822, in Virginia, his father, Robert Craig Warwick, was 20 and his mother, Esther Hull, was 17. Wm F. Warwick married Phebe Anthea PRAY in 1866, in Warm Springs, Virginia. They had 14 children in 24 years. He died on December 20, 1902, having lived a long life of 80 years, and was buried in Bath, Virginia.
During the American Civil War, if William Fechtig WARWICK was a soldier who likely required medical treatment, this is what, how medical treatments, disease evolved back during the American civil war.
The vast majority of deaths during the American Civil War were not on the battlefield; they were caused by disease. In 1861 germ theory did not exist, the root of infection remained a mystery, and medical training was crude. Little advancements had been made in the field since the American Revolution; some physicians still championed medieval methods of bloodletting, purging, and blistering to rebalance the body’s humors.
However, development in weaponry, namely faster, more accurate rifles and shells killed hundreds of thousands and left many more badly wounded. Thus the war forced doctors and nurses to rethink medical treatments, as tens of thousands of soldiers flooded the ill-equipped field hospitals. The sheer volume of injured men prompted rapid amputations. By 1865, a surgeon could remove a limb in six minutes flat. Anesthetics were common—chloroform and ether were given to patients, along with morphine for the pain. Ambulance service also was born during the Civil War. The fallen were gathered from the field, their wounds wrapped up, and they were shuttled to battle-side hospitals. But for many, these advancements in techniques and sanitation came too little too late—upwards of 500,000 Americans died from disease and infection before the war’s end.
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