Medicine has developed so dramatically over the last century that it is difficult to imagine a world in which its many benefits did not exist. Even as humans manage to eradicate some diseases, a look at history reminds us that there was a time when these and other diseases were rampant, and good health was the exception rather than the norm. There are many comparable time periods that medicine was needed and was used. With each, there were drastic changes to medical procedures and medical rules. Of the many different time periods that medicine was used; the comparison of medical care during the American Civil War and medical care during World War I is the most interesting. How did Civil War battlefield medicine compare with World War I battlefield medicine? That's a question that cannot be simply answered, but can be broken down into the overall sanitation of individuals, medical techniques, and overall medical staff for armies.
From 1861 to 1865 our nation's deadliest conflict was being disputed. The American Civil War had more Americans die than in the American Revolution, the War of 1812, the Mexican War, the Spanish-American War, World Wars I and II, the Korean War, Vietnam and the Persian Gulf War combined. ( Ballou) Approximately 600,000 soldiers and 100,000 civilians died. Of all these casualties, three-fourths died from wound infections or infectious diseases. ( Ballou) About 10 million soldiers became ill at some point during the civil war. A huge reason for this is because many men came from small towns and isolated farms. Individuals had never been exposed to disease. This resulted in millions of soldiers getting sick. ( Morris ) Of all the many different diseases that were going on duri...
... middle of paper ...
... 1999): 6. History
Study Center. Web. 5 May 2014.
Kreiser, Christine M. "Medic!." Military History (Lexington, VA) Nov 2005: 30-36. History
Study Center. Web. 5 May 2014.
Stepansky, Paul E. "Category Archives: Medicine in WWI." Medicine Health and History. N.p.
Web. 05 May 2014.
Campbell, John. "WWI: Medicine on the Battlefield." NCpedia Home Page. N.p., n.d. Web. 05
May 2014.
Dr. Charles F. Ballou, I.,II. "CIVIL WAR MEDICINE: THE CONFEDERATE SIDE." The
Washington Post (pre-1997 Fulltext) Jan 23 1996: 0. ProQuest. 4 May 2014 .
Lax, Eric. "On the Medical Front; Bleeding Blue and Gray Civil War Surgery and the Evolution
of American Medicine Ira M. Rutkow Random House: 396 Pp., $27.95." Los Angeles
Times Apr 17 2005: 0. ProQuest. 4 May 2014 .
With advances in weaponry came an increase in deaths and major limb injuries. During WWI the primary action was to amputate the limb rather than try and salvage it. This was due to the little time nurses, surgeons and anaesthetists had with each patient in the field hospitals, because they were overrun by more than double their expected capacity. There-fore, surgeons had to choose which critical patients to treat first, resulting in 41,000 ampu-tees during the First World War, all in need of artificial limbs (Pensions, 1939).
At Valley Forge, the weather and conditions were terrible (Document C) so I could get sick and die, and in Document A it stated that 1800 - 2500 died just because of sickness, which means that most people have already gotten sick, including doctors like Dr Waldo (Doc C) so the doctors would not be able to help too much with your sickness. Because of all the sick soldiers(Doc C and A), I can infer that when we go into battle we'd be very weak and we'll have a very slim chance of
The Civil War was the bloodiest war in American History. Even though the war was a
Most people in the beginning of the war; thought it was only going to last a few weeks or months, so not much effort was put into recruiting doctors or surgeons. Even so, surgeons really didn’t have formal training in medicine. They did not know much about bacteriology and were ignorant of what caused diseases. Most Civil War surgeons also had never treated a gun shot wound or performed surgery, which led to the fact that they were not qualified at all. They would usually have 2 years of schooling, with only bookwork in the first year, and the second year would usually just be a repeat. However, doctors tried the best they could at treating the wounded and injured, and knowledge of medicine improved a little bit more each year.
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
Every war, though happens for a reason and bring a better change, is often gruesome. The Civil War broke America in two groups and, at the time, was the war with the most casualties and injured men. As the fight to preserve the Union progressed, so did a number of other areas, such as weaponry and artillery. The advanced technology produced through the Civil War assisted in increasing number of casualties. The North was more fortuitous than the South in multitudinous ways. One of which includes the fact that their industrial society allowed them to produce a larger amount of weapons of a higher quality. One of the major reasons the Union triumphantly defeated the Confederate army was because of their more superior types of weapons.
2.75 million soldiers died in the end of the civil war 2 million from the north died and 750’000 from the souTH had died 620,000 people were killed 476,000 people were wounded 400,000 were captured/missing.
The Civil War split the nation in half. It tore apart families, and Union soldiers against Confederate soldiers for four miserable years. From the first shots fired at Fort Sumter 1861, and ending with a unanimous Confederate victory in 1865. All in all 630,000 people died and many thousands wounded. The deaths in the Civil War totally surpassed the death totals from any other war (1). For those managed to survive the up hill battle just began, they faced many unknowns in a world moving in an uncertain direction. With the north beating the succeeded south in the war, politicians faced a hard task of reuniting the divided country. With reconstruction now in affect, both northern workers, and southern farmers now face many new obstacles and uncertainties about their jobs. The southern farmers had it bad, they lost the war, lost their slaves, and were forced to move west in order to find new farmland and continue to make a manageable living. However the north and south would find out that they would need each other in order to move the country forward.
Hygiene was extremely poor prior to and during World War 1, especially for soldiers. Because of this and the fact that fighting soldiers couldn’t clean up wounds quickly enough, there were many deaths caused by infection alone. One big issue was trench foot. This was an awful infection caused by soldiers standing in the trenches for too long during battles. Over the course of the war, hygiene and infectious issues were being better dealt with. These issues led to vaccinations and treatment advancements. The earliest forms of the vaccinations and treatments used today were actually introduced in 1914. Those vaccinations and treatments have been improved upon since World War 1. One of the most fascinating things regarding medical procedures at this time has to be blood transfusions. It was 1917, when the first of hundreds of millions of blood transfusions was made. This idea has been improved upon as
During, and after World War I, there were lots of things that changed and advanced, some of the main, big changes and advances after World War I, was in the field of phycology and medicine. There were many different advances in the field of medicine after World War I, some of the main, medical advances, were in the field of surgery, development of new drugs, and in the field mental health and phycology.
Over 5000 volunteer nurses’ north and south served in military hospitals during the Civil War. Nurses were of all sorts and came from all over. Women wanted to be involved in this national struggle in any way they could. They did not want to stay home and play their traditional domestic roles that social convention and minimal career opportunities had confined the majority of their sex to. Many women thought of nursing as an extension of their home duties, almost like taking care of “their boys.” They recall the Civil War as a time when their work as nurses made a difference. It gave them an opportunity to prove they had the ability and courage to help.
620,000 people died (Civil War Trust), and countless were wounded in the Civil War. The civil war was bloody, and frightening. Anyone who fought in it was lucky to survive. But they didn’t survive without trauma. On the loud battlefields soldiers constantly saw their friends and fellow towns men drop dead on the ground all around. But guns weren’t the only thing to be afraid of, disease was as well. (Yale National Initiative). It claimed the majority of the 620,000 lives lost. In the end, the Union tasted victory, but not without a cost. The life of a soldier in the civil war was hell.
Advancement in Medicine has drastically been on the rise throughout history. The start of improvement in medicine could be seen during the Korean War. Since the war fought in Korea had an armistice signed between the two countries, many people has seen the Korean War as a failure. Countless lives were lost in vain to resolve a war that ended up reverting back to where it originally started. The failure of the Korean War has resulted in years of tense hostility between both North and South Korea and their neighboring countries. Though the Korean War was recognized as a failure, there was success that came from this war, the advancement in medicine. The fatality rate since World War II compared to the Korean War decreased drastically. “In World
Civil War During the American Civil War, which lasted from 1861-1865, over 620,000 accounted soldiers were killed. Known as the "the first modern war", historians generally agree that the reason for this was because this was a time of transition for the military. Armies and Navies were still using tactics where they would gather large forces of firepower to bear on the enemy. At the same time, weapons were being developed which were accurate and lethal well beyond any arms of the earlier conflicts.
In World War I and in the Vietnam War, the soldiers used tools such as guns, medications to keep them calm, first aid kits, melee combat weapons, rations of food, a form of communicating such as walkie talkies, or morse code. Due to the different kinds of terrain that soldiers would be in, different tools would be needed to assist in their survival. In rocky terrain, for example, they might wear heavier and more durable boots to keep being able to trek through the terrain. “When a mission took them to the mountains, they carried mosquito netting, machetes, canvas tarps, and extra bug juice.” In World War I, the soldiers from America traveled over seas to places like Europe, the Middle East, and Asia so that they could go fight in the war. Due to the soldiers having to travel, they needed to take medications in order to not contract diseases from those foreign