Battle Cry Of Freedom Analysis

I medicine had received a massive rebirth with creation of advanced diagnostic equipment, Lister’s Germ Theory, the typhoid vaccine, major advances in anesthesia, management of fluid balances, and aseptic surgical techniques. These techniques and advancements were unavailable to Civil War doctors. Another prominent medical historian, James McPherson, argues that Civil War doctors “knew of few ways except amputation to stop gangrene” in his book Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era. McPherson continues to derail Civil War doctors by dividing them into two separate groups: the radicals, who believed that amputation saved more lives than threatened them, and the conservatives, who tried to save the limb no matter the degree of the wound

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

Alfred Bollet devotes a somewhat negative chapter on the subject by arguing that most of the drugs used did more harm than good with the only valuable drugs being “anesthetics (ether and chloroform), opiates (particularly morphine), and quinine (for malaria).” George Worthington Adams and H.H. Cunningham lightly touch upon the subject in their books by addressing what ailments each drug cured and how much should be administered per patient. The narratives that do devote themselves entirely to the subject are small and distant in number. Laying the groundwork are Norman Franke’s dissertation and George Winston Smith book, Medicines for the Union Army: The United States Army Laboratories During the Civil War. Franke’s doctoral dissertation