Civil War Medicine

There was no penicillin. No oxygen tanks. No sterile surgical field. No intravenous lines. Little or no sanitation.

The hospital and other medical care of the Civil War era offered none of these medical treatments and procedures that we now take for granted as necessities. Is it any wonder, then, that the Civil War was responsible for more American casualties than the first World War and the Vietnam War combined?

The conditions that soldiers on both sides of the conflict lived in were brutal by today’s standards. Poor diet, no sanitary facilities, exposure to the elements – all these factors combined killed as many men by disease as were killed by battle. The soldiers existed on a diet that by and large lacked fresh food of any kind, and although some were able to supplement their rations of beans, hardtack, salt pork and coffee with fresh food scavenged from local farms, these scavenger hunts were for the most part unable to prevent the scurvy and other digestive problems that afflicted nearly every soldier sooner or later.

With no sanitary facilities existent in most of the camps, filth bred flies that spread disease throughout the camps. Every regiment, both Federal and Confederate, was plagued with what most of the doctors at the time called “dysentery;” this weakened the soldiers, already suffering from the effects of poor diets, and would often prove fatal. “Dysentery” was just as likely to be malaria, if the troops were stationed near water, or tuberculosis.

The treatment the doctors who worked with these soldiers prescribed for dysentery was often whisky and/or opium.

When the time came for battle, the surgeons and doctors who served the Union and Confederate armies faced work as grueling as being on the battlefield. In field hospitals, these doctors and surgeons worked in conditions so primitive that they often operated for days at a time without rest, by candlelight and daylight, in uniforms soaked with blood and gore. They would use the same instruments on each of the soldiers they treated, without sterilization in between.

During battle, the men who could not walk from the battlefield were carried off on stretchers to the triage area, where the assistant surgeon would does them with liquor and opium or morphine if the pain was great. The wound was examined, and if there were foreign bodies within the wound, the were removed, after which the wound was packed with link and bandaged. They were then taken to the field hospital, often a building that had been commissioned from the neighborhood for this purpose.

Ambulances – wagons, actually – took the men to these field hospitals, where the most grievously wounded, lying most often on the ground, awaited the operating table. Those with wounds to the extremities were treated first, usually by amputation, while those with slight wounds and those with wound most likely fatal (wounds to the head, chest, or stomach) were left until last.

Amputation was the most frequent treatment for any wound to the extremities. Gangrene set in quickly after the germ-infested operation was finished, and the filthy conditions of the field hospital, and amputation of the affected limb was seen as the easiest way to save the patient.

Medicine during the Civil War was primitive, to say the least. Many of the men who perished or who lost limbs during the war would have survived the same injuries had they been at home rather than in the unsanitary and disease-ridden conditions of the camp or field hospital.