Cesarean Sections

From: historyengine.richmond.edu On January 29th, 1822, Dr. Ebenezer Basset who was the town physician of Nassau, New York was abruptly interrupted by his medical assistant Jacob Kipp, who notified the doctor of their servant girl who was terribly ill. Braving the cold, Dr. Basset attended to the black servant girl who was lying in the snow with an unusually large cut on her abdomen and right next to her was a razor blade that was covered in blood. Upon further examining the youth of fourteen, Dr. Basset noticed and began to uncover a fetus hidden underneath the snow. Dr. Basset was in complete shock at what he had just witnessed. To his amazement,...

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Did Stonewall Jackson Have Hypochondria?

From: uselectionatlas.org General Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson was one of the most gifted commanders in U.S. History. But he has a dubious distinction that had haunted his legacy since the 1850’s; Jackson has been accused of being a hypochondriac. Jackson had some strange distinctions: 1 He thought he was “out of balance” in battle if he didn’t raise one arm while on his horse. He said he wanted to, “Keep the blood balanced.” 2.He refused to have pepper on his food, stating it made his left leg weak. 3.Despite wartime shortage, Jackson would constantly suck on lemons because he felt it helped his “dyspepsia.” 4.His staff noticed his strange...

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Was Stonewall Jackson a Hypochondriac?

By Usha Hari Stonewall Jackson, the Confederate general, was thought to be a hypochondriac. Even when his hand got wounded by a bullet during the First Battle of Bull Run, he kept his arm raised so that the blood might flow into his body. He avoided pepper in his food as he had a strange notion that it made his left leg weak. He was most comfortable in an upright standing posture so that all of his organs were aligned "naturally." He tried to cure his poor eyesight by keeping his head dipped into a basin of cold water with eyes open! From: au.ibtimes.c...

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“King Alcohol is More Formidable than Tyrant Lincoln”

From: historyengine.richmond.edu In 1862, throughout the war-ravaged Confederacy, the thoughts of all were turned to the War that tore apart the country.  The death and destruction that had already occurred seemed to foretell a conflict that would not soon be resolved.  In the midst of the fighting, soldiers struggled to remain vigilant and confident.  Romanticized visions of passionate soldiers, Confederates in particular, were created to motivate future as well as current soldiers to continue fighting “the good fight.”  An ideal soldier was one who fought bravely for a cause he believed in, and these beliefs were strengthened...

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The Day in the Life of a Union Prisoner of War: Disease and Deprivation

From: historyengine.richmond.edu The United States Sanitary Commission conducted a series of interviews following the conclusion of the Civil War. The Commission focused on the details of Union soldier's imprisonment during their service. The soldiers gave testimony as to their experience as a prisoner of war. The compilation of accounts details the suffering and privations of different soldiers both commissioned and non-commissioned officers. Private Joseph Grider was sworn in and examined in Virginia by the Commission. He detailed his survival from both the Libby and Danville Prisons operated by the Confederate States of America. The main...

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State-Supported Schools for the Blind for African-American Children

From: aph.org The first school for blind children in the United States was chartered in 1829, in Boston. It was quickly followed by schools in New York, Pennsylvania, and Ohio. In these cities, as well as other Northern cities in which schools for the blind were established, black and white children attended the same classes. In the South, however, racial attitudes, complicated by the institution of slavery, were much different. Slowly, after the close of the Civil War in 1865, the states in which slavery had been well established began to open departments or divisions for African-American children, usually in facilities separate from the...

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Remembering Our Gallant Dead

From: historyengine.richmond.edu Dealing with death is as unavoidable as death itself.  Grief that weighs on the hearts of those who have lost someone dear to them is a great burden to bear.  Imagine then the amount of sorrow and mourning in the Confederate States at the height of the American Civil War.  Ways of thinking about and dealing with the amount of loss of life during the Civil War were diverse.  William C. Davis in his book, "The Cause Lost: Myths and Realities of the Confederacy", addresses the changes that took place throughout the war in how citizens in the South dealt with the overwhelming personal loss....

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"The Popular Dose with Doctors": Quinine and the American Civil War

By Robert D. Hicks From: Chemical Heritage Magazine  1862, the second year of the American Civil War, Southerners took satisfaction in knowing that invading Union army troops would succumb to tropical diseases endemic to the South’s bayous, swamps, and coastal regions. Just wait until summer, Southern newspapers predicted. The first test of this theory came in April 1862 in Shiloh, Tennessee, where Union General William T. Sherman’s forces met the enemy in a bloody battle. Before and after the fight, typhoid, diarrhea, scurvy, and the fevers associated with malarial diseases ravaged troops on both sides. One physician wrote, “The pestilential...

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Southern, Sassy, and Strong

From: historyengine.richmond.edu Midnight train rides, cleaning wounds and changing dressing was not the job for a proper Southern woman. Kate Cummings took up the call to become and nurse and broke the holds that Southern society placed on women of middle to upper class. Kate traveled by train from her home in Mobile to different hospitals around the South assessing surgeons after the Battle of Shiloh and helping wounded in Georgia. While Northern hospitals system was very organized and detailed, the South was far from it. Doctors drank the medical whiskey that was to go to the patients, other women would not want to preform their duties...

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Catherine Wills Wears a Hair Locket to the Dedication of the Soldiers National Cemetery

From: historyengine.richmond.edu To commemorate the deaths of her two young sons, David Jr., and James, Catherine Wills wore a mourning brooch.  The gold brooch containing one blonde and one brunette lock of hair with a black ring around it was a fairly generic piece of jewelry during the nineteenth century.  Like many others who attended the dedication of the Soldiers National Cemetery in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania and heard Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, Wills may have worn her broach to this occasion.  The cemetery and dedication was of particular importance to the Wills family, as David Wills, the young boy’s father, had...

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A Poet Describes the Horrors of a Civil War Hospital

From: historyengine.richmond.edu In his poem "A March in the Ranks Hard-Prest", and "The Road Unknown", Walt Whitman described one of the most haunting memories of his medical career: “Then before I depart I sweep my eyes o'er the scene fain to absorb it all, / Faces [sic], varieties, postures beyond description, most in obscurity, / some of them dead, / Surgeons operating, attendants holding lights, the smell of ether, / the odor of blood, / The crowd, O the crowd of the bloody forms, the yard outside also fill'd.” The setting of Whitman’s nightmare was an impromptu field hospital likely located somewhere near a battlefield. Whitman’s...

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"The Slow Dead March of Camp-Disease": Death in the American Civil War

From: historyengine.richmond.edu Charles Furman had known Fannie Garden for only 13 days before he asked her to marry him. In all, they spent less than a month together before the Confederate government ordered him northward to fight the “soulless soldiers” of the “despised Yankee Nation." The letters they wrote in the years that followed captured both their own deepening love and the chaos and carnage of the American Civil War. He was prepared, he wrote, to fight and die to defend her—and to defend Confederate freedom. He was utterly unprepared, however, for the reality of war—for the tedium and toil of daily life, for the savage intensity...

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