Treatment of Burns During the Civil War

Civil War soldiers faced serious problems from burns. These injuries were produced by ordinary fire or by the explosion of gunpowder. They varied from the trivial to the most serious lesions. The treatments offered were the most advanced then available, and doctors did have some satisfactory results.

The famous Dr. Samuel Gross recommended the use of white-lead paint, the type used in the arts. The paint was mixed with linseed oil to the consistency of heavy cream. It was applied directly to the burns to cover them completely. A dressing of lint or cloth was then applied.

The application of wheat-lead paint to burns was a precursor to some of today’s treatments. Many burn patients were successfully treated with paint during the Civil War. The paint was soothing, and it diminished fluid loss from the burn surfaces. There was a danger of lead toxicity when the burned surface was very large, and a susceptibility to infection as none of the ointments or dressings were sterilized.

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Dr. Samuel Preston Moore

Some of the greatest heroes of Civil War medicine did not serve on the battlefields or hospitals. Great advances in health care administration were made by great organizational leaders. Samuel Preston Moore of Charleston, received his M.D. degree in 1834 from the Medical College of South Carolina. He entered the United States Army medical service immediately after his graduation and was known as a “spit and polish” officer. Moore served on frontiers in Florida, New York, Louisiana. During the Mexican War he was stationed along the Rio Grande. He served until the start of the Civil War, when he resigned his Federal position and was appointed Surgeon General of the Confederate Army by President Jefferson Davis.

At the start of the war, the Medical Department of the Confederate Army was understaffed, underfunded and disorganized. Moore’s clarity and love or order suited the task of creating an effective Medical Department. He established examining boards to weed out incompetent physicians. He faced a dramatic shortage of drugs and supplies by obtaining and utilizing medicinal plants from the Southern states and adopted the efficient new one-story pavilion hospital.

He organized the Association of Army and Navy Surgeons of the Confederate states and became its first president. The Confederate States Medical Journal was a publication he initiated in 1864. Despite the South’s drastic supply and manpower shortages, Dr. Moore headed a Medical Department that served its troops as well and maintained almost identical statistics to the much larger Medical Department of the North.

SAMUEL PRESTON MOORE
Physician and Surgeon-General of the Confederate States of America
1813-1889
Age in 1861: 48

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Civil War Medical Students

In 1860 there were five medical schools in the South, 27 in the North and three in the border states. It was customary for Southern medical students to attend schools in the North or in Europe.

Many of the formally educated doctors who served in the war, both Union and Confederate, had trained in Philadelphia at Jefferson Medical College or the University of Pennsylvania. In 1859, over 1200 medical students resided in the city. The 650 students from the South constituted the largest bloc of Southern sympathizers in Philadelphia.

The developing hostilities between the North and South during the 1850’s had begun to affect the medical community, demonstrated by the declining enrollment of Southern students in Northern medical schools.

When the news of abolitionist John Brown’s October, 1859 raid on Harper’s Ferry reached Philadelphia, two young men from Virginia led a mass exodus of about 200 Southern students from the city. One of these men, Hunter H. McGuire, would become personal physician to General Stonewall Jackson and later, a president of the American Medical Association.

Of the Southern schools operating at the start of the war, only the Medical College of Richmond, Virginia continued to train physicians throughout the Civil War. Many medical schools in America were forced to cut back their services, or close their doors.

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Hospital Days: Reminiscence of a Civil War Nurse

Hospital Days: Reminiscence of a Civil War Nurse
by Jane Stuart Woolsey /

The story of Jane Stuart Woolsey’s service as Superintendent of Nurses at the Fairfax Seminary Hospital during the Civil War offers insights into the role of women in our nation’s greatest conflict and the beginnings of the nursing profession.

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This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War

This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War
by Drew Gilpin Faust /

More than 600,000 soldiers lost their lives in the American Civil War. An equivalent proportion of today's population would be six million. In This Republic of Suffering, Drew Gilpin Faust reveals the ways that death on such a scale changed not only individual lives but the life of the nation, describing how the survivors managed on a practical level and how a deeply religious culture struggled to reconcile the unprecedented carnage with its belief in a benevolent God. Throughout, the voices of soldiers and their families, of statesmen, generals, preachers, poets, surgeons, nurses, northerners and southerners come together to give us a vivid understanding of the Civil War's most fundamental and widely shared reality.

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Blue, Gray and Red: Two Nurses’ Views of the Civil War

Blue, Gray and Red: Two Nurses’ Views of the Civil War
by Louisa May Alcott and Kate Cumming /

Two Nurses - Two Experiences - One Civil War

Blue, Gray and Red presents the hard reality of the Civil War. There are no stirring bugle calls, only the calls of the wounded. There are no battlefield heroics, but there is also no lack of heroism. It presents the suffering and courage of both sides, as written by two people—two nurses—who lived through it.

Not many people realize that Louisa May Alcott, the author of Little Women, was also a Civil War nurse. While serving at the Union Hospital in Washington DC, she wrote a series of letters to her family describing her experiences. These were published in Commonwealth magazine and eventually became the basis for Hospital Sketches—the book that is presented here.

In 1862 Kate Cumming volunteered to be a nurse for the Confederacy and saw duty until the end of the war in 1865. During that period she kept a journal, which was later turned into a book called A Journal of Hospital Life in the Confederate Army of Tennessee. This was later re-edited and published as Gleanings from Southland, which is the version used here. Her account is made all the more tragic by the fact that she was not only reporting on the horrors of the battlefield, but on the horrors of a country that was literally being dismantled around her.

No understanding of the Civil War can be complete without appreciating this side of the war as well.

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Dr. John Julian Chisolm

Julian Chisolm’s family had come from Scotland to settle in South Carolina in 1717. The innovative Chisolm had a sophisticated medical background. He received his M.D. degree from the University of South Carolina in 1850 and continued his studies in Paris and London and visited military hospitals in Milan. Returning to Charleston in 1852, Chisolm demonstrated great skill as a surgeon and lecturer. He created and instituted new systems for expanding medical education and conducted a free hospital for slaves. In 1858 he received an appointment from his alma mater and was said to be the youngest professor of surgery in the United States.

Chisolm, remembered as energetic, enthusiastic, and a powerful teacher, received the Confederacy’s first commission issued to a medical officer, and attended to the wounded at Fort Sumter. He immediately began writing A Manual of Military Surgery, For the Use of Surgeons in the Confederate Army, and published it just four months after Fort Sumter.

Dr. Chisolm had extensive experience with chloroform as an anesthetic and was a strong advocate for its use. He lobbied to conserve the South’s supply of chloroform, which had traditionally been applied to a cloth and held to the patient’s nose. Chisolm developed a nasal inhaler, that both conserved the anesthesia and allowed the doctor to deliver a more controlled dosage. It would become known as the “Chisolm Inhaler”. He also designed a funnel vaporizer for administering chloroform.

After the war, during which he became one of the most famous Confederate surgeons, Chisolm was appointed Professor of Operative Surgery and Diseases of the Eye and Ear at the University of Maryland. He later founded the Presbyterian Eye, Ear and Throat Hospital of Baltimore.

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Dr. Samuel Gross

One of the most famous surgeons of the 19th century grew up on a Pennsylvania farm. At the age of six, Samuel Gross announced his intention to become a surgeon. Brought up among the Pennsylvania Dutch, he knew almost no English at the age of 15. He began to study and eventually became fluent in English, German, Greek, Latin, French and Italian. At 17 he began the study of medicine under a country practitioner. At the age of 23 he was awarded his M.D. degree from the Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia.

Five years after graduation, Gross added “teacher” and “author” to his accomplishments.He began to lecture and to write medical books and published the first English-language book on pathological anatomy. Many Civil War doctors, North and South, studied under Dr. Gross.

A tall man with a handsome face, Gross was known as a painstaking and skillful surgeon. He was a natural teacher, earnest and enthusiastic. He married an accomplished woman of English descent and their son Samuel later followed in his father’s professional footsteps.

Gross was one of the earliest to create an American medical literature of importance, including a textbook on surgery used by physicians throughout the Civil War. A copy of the manual was captured by Confederate troops early in the war and reprinted for the use of the Southern surgeons.

Dr. Gross’ knowledge and wisdom gave a strong base to 19th century American medicine. He founded two medical journals, was the founder and first president of the American Surgical Association and the first president of the Alumni Association of the Jefferson Medical College. His surgical demonstrations are depicted in Thomas Eakins’ painting, “The Gross Clinic.”

DR. SAMUEL DAVID GROSS
1805-1884
Age in 1861: 56

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