The Civil War was the fundamental event in America's historical realization. The war fixed two necessary questions which left it unclear by the revolution. The war all started because of rigid differences between the freemen and the slave states over the power of the national government to ban slavery in the regions that had not became states yet. The American Civil War was the biggest and by far the most vicious battle in the Western world between the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815 and the beginning of World War I in 1914. Northern victory was the war that preserved the United States as one nation and broken the foundation of slavery that had separated the country from its beginning (James McPherson, 2013). Back in the time of the Civil War, hospitals did not have a lot of medicine. There was not antibiotics and barley any vaccines because back in that time they did not know that germs caused most of the diseases. During the Civil War doctors received inadequate medical education, most surgeons were very unfamiliar with gunshot wounds. The mini ball produced very harsh wounds to soldiers that made it difficult to treat the wounds (National Museum of Health and Medicine, 2014). The Northern and Southern medical departments were not prepared for removing wounded soldiers from the battlefield and transferring them to a hospital. Hospital did their best to care for the sick and wounded. Things such as Blood typing, X-rays, antibiotics, and modern medical tests and procedures were imaginary. Diarrheal diseases affected almost every soldier and killed hundreds of thousands of men (National Museum of Health and Medicine, 2014). Even though surgeons used ether and chloroform consistently as painkillers, surgery was done with unwash... ... middle of paper ... ...odern-medicine-1103311.htm National Museum of Health and Medicine, (2014): “Medicine during the Civil War” Retrieved from http://www.medicalmuseum.mil/index.cfm?p=exhibits.nationswounds.page_01 Janet King, (2014): “Civil War Medicine” Retrieved from http://vermontcivilwar.org/medic/medicine3.php James McPherson, (2013): “A Brief Overview of the American Civil War” Retrieved from http://www.civilwar.org/education/history/civil-war-overview/overview.html Rochester General Health System, (2014): “Civil War Medicine and the RCH” Retrieved from http://www.rochestergeneral.org/about-us/rochester-general-hospital/about-us/rochester-medical-museum-and-archives/online-exhibits/civil-war-medicine-and-the-rochester-city-hospital/ OSU Department of History, (2014): “Civil War Medicine” Retrieved from http://ehistory.osu.edu/uscw/features/medicine/cwsurgeon/introduction.cfm
Soldiers faced diseases like measles, small pox, malaria, pneumonia, camp itch, mumps, typhoid and dysentery. However, diarrhea killed more soldiers than any other illness. There were many reasons that diseases were so common for the causes of death for soldiers. Reasons include the fact that there were poor physicals before entering the army, ignorance of medical information, lack of camp hygiene, insects that carried disease, lack of clothing and shoes, troops were crowded and in close quarters and inadequate food and water.
Resection was a process that “involved cutting open the limb, sawing out the damaged bone, and then closing the incision” (Jones, 1). Resection allows the patient to keep his limbs but it requires a great ordeal of time and skill. This also contributed to the common practice of amputation during the war. But there were cases where surgeons did use this method. Terry J. Jones said in his NY Times article, “resections were used more frequently after surgeons learned that amputations had a much higher mortality rate” (Jones, 1). In another article by Corydon Ireland, it describes Mitchell Adam’s, a Harvard lecturer, grandfather who served as a volunteer surgeon during the Civil War. In the article, “Adams was not a champion of hasty amputations, but argued for excision and other limb-saving measures. And he describes the everyday pressures of a country practice in Framingham, Mass” (Ireland, 1). This meant that not all surgeons at the time only wanted to amputate but strived for alternate methods. This new knowledge shows that some surgeons were more dedicated to thinking about the well-being of their patients than others and this opens up to other possibilities that may have occurred during the war. This allows an image to come to mind of a surgeon diligently operating on a soldier with care and compassion. However, even though there may be many possibilities, we can’t truly know every event that occurs during a
In the early 1900’s the United States’ medical field was stagnant causing many deaths in wartime. The majority of deaths in war times were often caused by diseases that were incurable. The United States medical field had to grow to current needs in war but it grew very slowly. The United States Army Ambulance Service was established on June 23, 1917 and the Sanitary Corps established one week later on the 30th. (David Steinert). The Sanitary Corps quickly expanded to nearly 3,000 officers during World War I but, this field was still much smaller than any other
In reading Dr. John A. Hayward’s account called “A Casualty Clearing Station” from www.firstworldwar.com, he states that his time caring for patients in the suburbs did not prepare him for what he was to experience as a doctor/surgeon in the war, tending to injuries fresh from the battlefield. Hayward speaks of the state of shock, panic he was in the first time he cared for the wounded directly from the frontline, a memory that would always stay with him. As I continued to read his story, I was curious as to how those injured on the frontline were brought to him. I decided to write about the process of transporting the injured and where were they brought. I want a clearer picture of those brave individuals that went into the fields to bring back soldiers who needed care, and who tended to the wounded.
Anesthetics were not used in surgery until October 16, 1846, in Massachusetts General Hospital (Youngson 51). The anesthesia was a inhaled gas known as ether. In 1847 a doctor by the name of James Simpson popularized chloroform as an alternative to ether. According to Simpson chloroform could do more with less, act faster and last longer than ether, is more pleasing to the senses than ether, and is cheaper (qtd. in Youngson 70). Chloroform also did not need an inhaling device like ether did; it could be placed on a piece of cloth and work just as well (Youngson 70).
Limbs were being shattered and wounds were becoming infected and spreading throughout the body. Even though the Civil War was a gruesome time, many lifesaving procedures were born through it. Because of the high medical need during the American Civil War, necessary advances such as medical inventions, lifesaving procedures, and reconstructive surgery established the foundation for our current medical methods. Ambulances were further developed from the base model which already existed during the war. The ambulance’s main purpose was to speedily take injured soldiers from the battlefield to the medical and doctors in order to receive appropriate care.
Many historians, like James Robertson, claim that “Instances were many when the only ‘anesthesia’ used was a bullet or a piece of wood thrust between a soldier’s teeth to keep him from biting his tongue while the surgeon cut, sawed, and sutured.” These narratives base their arguments solely on diaries and letters from soldiers who witnessed patients being physically restrained for surgery by doctors and orderlies and assumed the patient did not have anesthetic or saw surgeons perform operations on howling and writhing men while assistants held them down. Today, medical historians have separated the truth from the myth. With the truth being that surgery under anesthesia began in 1846 and became a universal requirement during the Civil War. Doctors near the battlefield used chloroform, while hospitals primarily used ether for operations and painful wound treatments. Many of the passing soldiers saw the patient in the excitement stage of anesthesia where an anesthetized person moans, shouts, and writhes regardless if surgery is being performed or not, thus explaining why doctors needed assistants to hold patients down so they could work and perform operations successfully. Plus, doctors normally gave their patient just enough anesthetic to make the patient insensible to the pain. Numerous military historians argue along the same lines as Duffy and Bollet, but instead of focusing
Disease and courage are inexplicably intertwined, as can be seen through the sometimes painful letters of soldiers and doctors wrote home to their families. Despite the fact that approximately 620,000 soldiers died on both side of the Civil War, and over two-thirds because of diseases like malaria and symptoms like diarrhea, soldiers still found the strength to believe it was honor to die for their country and their manhood, even when their deaths were a lot less noble than they thought it would be. In the end, the two major causes for death during the Civil War was not bombardments or enemy fire or starvation—but rather, courage and
Surgeries at the time of WWI were a direct result of the Industrial Revolution’s new technology; these surgical advances struggled to fix the horrible injuries sustained by soldiers from the new sophisticated weaponry. "Every war stimulates medical research. It’s sad, but true," said Frank Freemon. Although many soldiers died during attempts at things like reconstructive surgery and Caesarian sections, experimenting in the surgical fields improved conditions and advanced the science, as well as develop new professions in surgery. During this time, surgery was becoming more successful by leaps and bounds, attempting to overcome problems that killed soldiers like hemorrhaging, infection, and gangrene, with new inventions in the field, like transfusions and asepsis. The role surgery played during this war, and in the complete history of surgery, was important enough to be repeated in a famous novel, A Farewell to Arms; “Multiple superficial wounds of the left and right thigh and left and right knee and right foot. Profound wounds of right knee and foot. Lacerations of the scalp (59).” Later in the book, x-rays and methods of birthing are mentioned; both failures and successes in surgery appear in this book, showing that, to achieve the lofty goal of improving the lives of humans, these surgeons had to experiment with surgery.
Infection was not only an issue due to a lack of sanitation. There was little knowledge about how the speed of the treatment of a patient could alter their survival rate. The discovery of patient prioritization during World War One greatly reduced the number of fatalities in the field hospitals. World War One saw the rise of two main concepts related to patient prioritization: Triage, and The Golden Hour. Both of these ideas have continued to be important concepts in modern medicine. The process of triage was introduced before the war, but only gained popularity during war. Triage became standard practice in WWI and “nurses became much more systematic in their approach” (“Nursing and Medicine During World War I” ceufast.com). The reason this
When the Civil War began in April 1861, people knew nothing about infections and what the cause of infections was. The monumental amount of wounded soldiers presented challenges for the naive medical field. A total of 620,000 soldiers died during the Civil War from combat, starvation, and from disease (Civil War Facts, 2014). For every soldier who died in combat, two others died of disease. The reason was due to unsanitary and filthy conditions, untrained and unprepared medical staff. Medical boards were approving inadequate students due to the demand of help needed to treat wounded soldiers. Most Civil War physicians had only treated colds and sore throats prior to the war. Many of the physicians had never treated a gunshot wound or preformed a surgical procedure until the war. The risk of surgery was tremendous, due to the high rates of post-surgical infection. Unsanitary hospitals and camps housed the wounded soldiers all in the same area, which was a breeding ground for infections and the spread of diseases.
In those 64 years, surgeons made many discoveries that caused important advancements in the world of surgery. There were new ways of dealing with infection that also improved public health (Porter 110). These consisted of washing wounds with vinegar, wine, freshly voided urine, or boiled water, then cleaning the wound of foreign objects, then covered in a simple bandage meant it would heal without trouble (Magner 295). These ideas were discovered by Joseph Lister around 1865. Lister was the first to challenge the idea that infection of a wound was inevitable. He found that if a wound was covered in a clean lint dressing and soaked in linseed oil and carbolic then it would not get infected (Porter 231). This discovery was called antisepsis. However, his ideas were not widely accepted. In fact, many surgeons did not like the smell of carbolic, and other’s problems with this were the reason his teachings were not accepted by the American Surgical Association (Porter 231). Another example of the improvement of public health was handwashing. In earlier practices, surgeons did not wash their hands because it was not proven effective until after 1867, and would go from the morgue to laboring women which caused the infant and female mortality rates to increase (Williams). However, Lister also found handwashing helps prevent infection at the same time he discovered the wound dressing (Porter 231). So, during the Victorian era, hand
The EMS system goes back to the Crusades in the 11th century. The Knights of St. John were instructed by Arab and Greek doctors for first-aid treatment. The Knights were the first medical responders of that time, treating both sides of the war. The injured were taken to tents to be treated further. In 1792, the chief physician in Napoleons Army, Baron Dominique-Jean Larrey, designed and created the “flying ambulance”, which was a special type of carriage staffed with a group of medical personnel made to access every part of the battlefield. Then, in 1797, he also instituted the first pre-hospital system designed to triage and transport the wounded in the field to proper aid stations. Larrey’s actions and groundbreaking ideas helped increase the chances for survival among wounded soldiers and ultimately benefitted Napoleon’s conquest efforts.
Military medicine struggles to fulfill all of the missions it has set out for itself and risks being successful in none of them. Army Medicine is at a critical decision point, the results of which will have a lasting impact on the military and military medicine. This essay will argue a position to create a more efficient military medical system while developing a medical force that is ready to adequately care for ill and injured service members in deployed settings. In short, it involves drastically cutting the active duty medical force and eliminating most military treatment facilities (MTFs).
Pre hospital care and clinical practice in civilian life is not a new idea, in fact it is has been around in one form or another for roughly 200 years. Its foundations lie in the military. During the Napoleonic wars with a French surgeon named Dominique-Jean Larrey. (1) Pre hospital care has come a long way from hauling fallen soldiers off the battlefield in a horse drawn carriage (1) to transporting patients in a different kind of carriage, a four wheel drive one to be precise. Pre hospital care and clinical practice owes many of its advancements in the 200 years since it has existed to the military. Their practices or research conducted during military conflicts has influenced civilian pre hospital care and clinical practice in the areas of triage systems, transport systems, clinical management, equipment and education to name but a few, but where it has had the most influence has been on the transport systems and clinical practices used. Their uses in the military pre hospital care world have worked particularly well in the civilian world. As a result of such they have been adapted by civilian paramedics quite readily.