Existing comment:
Civil War Hospitals:
-- "The memory of the almost intolerable thirst and pain that followed [my being wounded], the being gathered up in a blanket by sympathizing comrades and friends, and transported as tenderly as possible in an ambulance to the deserted house taken as a field hospital... the floor was literally covered with improvised beds containing other specimens of shattered humanity." -- Lieutenant Edward Ferguson -- Commandery of Wisconsin -- 1888
As great as the losses on the battlefield were during the Civil War, the losses to disease were even greater. Although significant advances in surgery were made during the war, some doctors were poorly informed and provided inadequate treatment to sick and wounded soldiers.
Physicians had the skills to administer anesthetics and to amputate limbs. But internal medicine was in its infancy during the early 1860s, and doctors had not yet discovered the germ theory of disease. Surgeons operated in field hospitals without even washing their hands between patients, unknowingly contributing to the onset of gangrene infections. Malaria, typhus, and especially dysentery, caused by or associated with unsanitary conditions and insects, accounted for thousands of casualties.
Indeed, of the 12,216 Wisconsin soldiers who died during the Civil War, 8.022 (nearly two-thirds) were lost to disease. Some soldiers felt that hospitals should be avoided if at all possible, since diseases seemed to be most readily acquired at health care facilities. |