February 2015 ~ Civil War Rx

Civil War Hospital Ship

The U.S.S. Red Rover, a captured Confederate vessel, was refitted as a hospital ship.

Tuesday, February 24, 2015

By Ronald S. Coddington, 3-8-14 Samuel Kingston, a Union soldier and prisoner of war, languished in a dungeon on a late winter’s day in March 1864. The cell was in the basement of infamous Libby Prison in Richmond, Va., the capital of the Confederacy. A severe cough and cold racked his body. His cellmates were similarly affected. Ten in all, they were crammed into a dank, drafty cell not much larger than a common tent. Rebel guards provided Kingston and the others with nothing more than scraps of food for subsistence and an open bucket for a toilet. If some of the guards had had their way, the prisoners would be left to rot in the filth and...

Wounded Warriors: Civil War Amputation

8:32 PM Carole Adrienne No comments

Compiled by Laura June Davis In the heat of battle, Civil War doctors often had to make quick diagnoses of soldiers’ injuries. According to The Medical and Surgical History of the War of the Rebellion, 1861-65, 70% of all wounds were to the extremities—35.6% to the upper extremities and 35.2% to the lower extremities. These statistics help explain why surgeons performed so many battlefield amputations; if they couldn't save the limb, they wanted at least to save the soldier’s life. When deciding whether or not to amputate a limb, a cursory probe of a wound was often the only examination a doctor had the time (or the ability) to conduct before...

The Dangers of Amputation Surgery

8:32 PM Carole Adrienne No comments

From: civilwarmonitor.com This drawing of Union soldier Milton E. Wallen highlights the dangers of amputation surgery. After having his arm removed by Confederate doctors, Wallen headed toward Union lines for medical attention. While recuperating at the Navy School Hospital in Annapolis, Wallen’s stump became infected with gangrene. “Hospital gangrene” was a chronic problem during the war. A small black spot would appear in the wound and slowly expand, resulting in loosened skin, necrosis of body tissue, and corresponding putrid smells. The likelihood of gangrene increased the longer an amputation surgery was delayed—thereby increasing the...

Andersonville Amputation

8:32 PM Carole Adrienne 1 comment

From: civilwarmonitor.com This photograph of Corporal Calvin Bates of Co. E, 20th Maine Infantry, reminds us that not all amputations resulted from bullet wounds. A prisoner at Andersonville, Bates suffered inhumane treatment at the hands of his prison guards. His maltreatment resulted in illness, decay, and ultimately the amputation of his feet. Learn more about Civil War prison conditions at www.CivilWarRx.com....

The Civil War and P.T.S.D.

8:31 PM Carole Adrienne No comments

By Dillon Carroll, 5-21-14 Edson Bemis was a hard man to kill. Rebel soldiers tried three times, and three times they failed. At the Battle of Antietam, a musket ball ripped through his left arm. Two years later, in the horrible fighting in the Wilderness, he was shot in the abdomen, just above the groin. The ball was never extracted, remaining in his body until the day he died. The Confederates came the closest to killing Bemis in February 1865. At Hatcher’s Run, Va., a Minié ball struck him in the head. He lay near death for several days, his skull cracked and leaking brain matter. Most passed him off for dead. Dr. Albert VanDevour, however,...

Disabled Soldiers

8:31 PM Carole Adrienne No comments

From: civilwarmonitor.com Many soldiers, like Private William Sargent of Co. E, 53rd Pennsylvania Infantry (above), continued to don their uniforms after their amputations. Federals and Confederates alike worried about the immoral and idle behavior that would arise if disabled soldiers did not return to work and provide for themselves. The creation of the Invalid Corps (later renamed the Veteran Reserve Corps) allowed amputees and other wounded soldiers to serve as aides to the army—cooks, nurses, or prison guards—or to return to combat if their injuries were not too sever...

Dr. Thomas Fearn

8:31 PM Carole Adrienne No comments

By Taylor M. Polites, 2-28-13 Excerpted from: The Bloody Occupation of Northern Alabama On Jan. 16, 1863, Dr. Thomas Fearn died of pneumonia at his home in the northern Alabama city of Huntsville. Fearn had studied medicine in London, Paris and Philadelphia, and was the first doctor to treat malaria patients with quinine. He was also a businessman and slaveholder. He had served at the February 1861 Constitutional Convention and in the first Confederate Congress in Montgomery, Ala. Fearn’s illness was reportedly of long duration, having begun when he was imprisoned for supporting guerrilla activity after the Third Division of the Union’s Army...

Counting the Costs of the Civil War

8:31 PM Carole Adrienne No comments

By Jeffrey Allen Smith and B. Christopher Frueh, 11-7-13 While the desire to document military exploits and wars is as old as writing itself, the recording of military medical data is a relatively modern phenomenon. Although some initial attempts to chronicle the health of troops occurred in the first half of the 19th century, the first large-scale, wartime medical and behavioral health surveillance effort was conducted during the American Civil War. This is partly a reflection on the dismal state of the medical profession before the mid-19th century. By the Civil War era, medical practice had improved markedly over the previous century,...

A Prosthetic

8:31 PM Carole Adrienne No comments

From: civilwarmonitor.com Private George W. Lemon (above) was among the soldiers who elected to use a prosthesis. As early as 1862, the Union government began allocating resources for wounded veterans to purchase an artificial arm or leg. Several Confederate states followed suit in 1864. Payments of $50-$75 covered the cost of the prosthesis as well as any required travel to have the soldier outfitted with his new limb. (Image Credit: National Library of Medicin...

The Empty Sleeve

8:31 PM Carole Adrienne No comments

From: civilwarmonitor.com The empty sleeve became a symbol of the postwar era. By pinning up a shirt sleeve or trouser leg, war veterans emphasized their sacrifices, mettle, and manhood. Some amputees—like Lucius Fairchild of Wisconsin and Francis R. T. Nichols of Louisiana—even utilized their injuries to garner votes and gain political office. The above drawing by Winslow Homer uses the image of the empty sleeve to symbolize the great changes ushered in by the Civil War: distorted bodies, altered gender relations, and newfound freedoms. (Image Credit: Harper’s Weekly.) ...

The Numbers Illustrated: Civil War Battle Casualties

8:01 PM Carole Adrienne No comments

From: civilwar.org New military technology combined with old-fashioned tactical doctrine to produce a scale of battle casualties unprecedented in American histo...

The Scholarly Challenge

8:00 PM Carole Adrienne No comments

From: civilwar.org Compiling casualty figures for Civil War soldiers is a complex process. Indeed, it is so complex that even 150 years later no one has, and perhaps no one will, assemble a specific, accurate set of numbers, especially on the Confederate side. A true accounting of the number of men in the armies can be approached through a review of three primary documents: enlistment rolls, muster rolls, and casualty lists. Following any of these investigative methods one will encounter countless flaws and inconsistencies--the records in question are little sheets of paper generated and compiled 150 years ago by human beings in one of the...

Consequences

8:00 PM Carole Adrienne No comments

From: civilwar.org Approximately one in four soldiers that went to war never returned home. At the outset of the war, neither army had mechanisms in place to handle the amount of death that the nation was about to experience. There were no national cemeteries, no burial details, and no messengers of loss. The largest human catastrophe in American history, the Civil War forced the young nation to confront death and destruction in a way that has not been equaled before or since. Recruitment was highly localized throughout the war. Regiments of approximately one thousand men, the building block of the armies, would often...

Casualties of War

8:00 PM Carole Adrienne No comments

From: civilwar.org There were an estimated 1.5 million casualties reported during the Civil War. A "casualty" is a military person lost through death, wounds, injury, sickness, internment, capture, or through being missing in action. "Casualty" and "fatality" are not interchangeable terms--death is only one of the ways that a soldier can become a casualty. In practice, officers would usually be responsible for recording casualties that occurred within their commands. If a soldier was unable to perform basic duties due to one of the above conditions, the soldier would be considered a casualty. This means that one soldier...

Medicine in the Civil War

8:00 PM Carole Adrienne No comments

From: americancivilwar.com The doctor of a regiment in the Civil War was called a surgeon. These men were responsible for treating the sick and wounded of their regiment. Often there were so many wounded that they treated wounded men from many other regiments. This was especially true at Gettysburg where so many soldiers were injured. Surgeons in both armies were taxed to the limits of their endurance and treated the most severe cases first. The remaining soldiers languished in the open air, waiting their turn on the surgeon's table. For the wounded, the horrors of the battlefield were only equaled by the horrors they experienced in a field...