"The Most Fatal of All Acute Diseases:" Pneumonia and the Death of Stonewall Jackson

By Dr. Matthew Lively, 5-13-13 The Death of "Stonewall" Jackson. As night fell and a full moon rose in the sky, Lieutenant General Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson was becoming increasingly impatient. Although he had just orchestrated one of the most successful flank attacks in military history, he wanted more. It was May 2, 1863, and the second day of the Battle of Chancellorsville was coming to a close. The men of Jackson’s Second Corps, Army of Northern Virginia, had attacked the unsuspecting right flank of the Union army and had driven it back nearly two miles before confusion and darkness stalled the action. Anxious to continue the attack,...

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St. Mary's Hospital

From: rochestergeneral.org St Mary’s became Rochester’s first functioning hospital when it opened its doors on September 17, 1857. The first union soldiers were received at the hospital in 1862, although it would not be until March of 1863 that St. Mary’s would be officially designated a federal “Army General Hospital.” In spite of its official status, by the end of 1863, the hospital had admitted relatively few wounded soldiers most likely due to the high cost of transporting the wounded from the battlefields to western New York. The district U.S. Surgeon and military inspector, Dr. Azel Backus, advised the Nuns at the hospital to prepare...

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Medicine in the Bloodiest War

By Thomas Sweeney, M.D. The Civil War was the bloodiest war ever fought by the United States. More lives were lost in it than in all other American wars combined, from the Revolutionary War to the Korean War. The Civil War saw the death of some 618,000 souls--the Union 360,000, the Confederates, 258,000. Disease as a Cause of Death. The principal killer in the Civil War was not the cannon or the musket but disease; 414,000 died from disease. The prevalence of disease and the high death rate resulted from a number of factors. A majority of soldiers were from rural areas and had not been exposed to measles and other diseases of urban living....

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American Medical Association Founder, Nathan Smith Davis, M.D.

From: ama-assn.org Born in 1817, Nathan Smith Davis founded the American Medical Association when he was just thirty years old. He received his medical training at the Medical College of Western New York and through apprenticeships with individual physicians, as was the custom in the mid-nineteenth century. He received the degree Doctor of Medicine in January 1837, just a few days past his twentieth birthday. As a young doctor in western New York in 1844, Davis was elected to serve in the New York Medical Society, where he worked to improve medical education and licensure. A year after his election, Davis introduced a resolution endorsing...

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Helen L. Gilson Osgood, Civil War Nurse (1836-1868)

From: findagrave.com Civil War Nurse. Helen L. Gilson originally selected teaching for a profession, and she taught until 1858, when throat trouble made it impossible to continue. She then took a position as the governess to the family of Frank Fay, who was the Mayor of Chelsea, Massachusetts. After the Union defeat at Bull Run, Helen and Fay went to Virginia to aid in treating the wounded and recovering the dead. They both devoted the next three years to traveling to the battlefields for this work. In 1864 Mayor Fay had to go to Baltimore and he directed Helen to go to Petersburg, Virginia and prepare for the expected battle. At Petersburg...

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Annie Bell, Civil War Nurse

From: mifflinburgtelegraph.com Although Annie Bell was not native of Union County, she did go to Bucknell University. She is well written about and the University at Lewisburg has much information about her. She was born in Blair County, Pa. April 9, 1839 to Martin and Eliza Bell. She graduated from Bucknell University in 1858. She was an unpaid volunteer at Harpers Ferry, Dec. 8, 1862. She helped tend the wounded at the Battle of Antietam in Sept. 1862. She did also serve at Gettysburg and then went to Nashville, Tenn. At Gettysburg she was at the 12th Corps hospital on the George Bushman farm where there were 1,200 wounded from July 2 thru...

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Cancer and Bitterness: Ulysses S. Grant Nurses His Sickness

By Chris Mackowski, 7-8-15 As Ulysses S. Grant’s throat cancer continued to eat away at him through the spring of 1885, he continued to struggle with pain of another sort, too. He was, at the time, in a race to complete his memoirs before the cancer struck him down, but his backwards glance wasn’t cast toward the Civil War only. He could not forget the events of the previous May that had nearly ruined him. His business partners, Ferdinand Ward and James Fish, had swindled him, leaving him and his entire family destitute. It was, said Grant’s editorial assistant, Adam Badeau, a “shameful story of craft and guile in all its horrible proportions....

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The Roots of Southern Folk Medicine

By Phyllis D. Light, 5-26-15 Meet Phyllis at the Natural Living Expo, November 14-15 in Marlboro, MA. She will be presenting two workshops and conducting private consultations. By the time the Pilgrims formed the English settlement known as Plymouth Colony in 1620, the South had already been explored and settled by the Spanish for almost 100 years in present day Florida. Because the Spanish, then later the French and Irish, settled there, it is no coincidence that this southern land is where our only traditional American folk medicine — other than Native American traditional medicine — developed. The roots of Southern and Appalachian Folk...

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Trusting the Water Cure

By W. Caleb McDaniel, 7-24-12 [This is the paper I delivered on July 20 at the 2012 annual meeting of the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic in Baltimore. The (slightly modified) title of the talk was: “Spreading the News about Hydropathy: How Did Americans Learn to Stop Worrying and Trust the Water Cure?” A printer-friendly version can be found in Rice University’s Digital Scholarship Archive.] Historians of the early republic now understand a great deal about how the post office, the steam engine, the telegraph, and the printing press helped to stitch a growing nation together while simultaneously connecting Americans...

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Trauma and Surgery: "The Smell of Ether, the Odor of Blood"

From: medicalmuseum.mil Popular but generally incorrect images of Civil War medicine involve surgery-amputations without anesthesia, piles of arms and legs, the surgeon as a butcher. By modern standards, wartime surgery was limited. Despite the lack of both surgical experience and sanitary conditions, the survival rate among those who underwent the knife was better than in previous wars. Amputation was not the only surgical recourse available. Surgeons also extracted bullets, operated on fractured skulls, reconstructed damaged facial structures, and removed sections of broken bones. As bullets hit their victims, shattered bone and shredded...

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Horses of the Civil War Leaders

From: civilwarhome.com The battle chargers of the general officers of the Confederate and Federal armies during the American Civil War, wrote their names upon the scrolls of history by their high grade of sagacity and faithfulness. They carried their masters upon the tedious march and over the bullet-swept battlefields, and seemed to realize their importance in the conflict. The horse of the commanding officer was as well known to the rank and file as the general himself, and the soldiers were as affectionately attached to the animal as was the master. General Grant's Horses When the Civil War broke out, my father,(1) General Grant, was appointed...

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