#ESTABLISHED A WAR HOSPITAL FULL#

Except during huge battles, such as Antietam and Gettysburg, they did not serve on the battlefield. The Union Army also employed 85 acting surgeons and 5,532 acting assistant surgeons, who served as “contract surgeons” in general hospitals.

Regimental surgeons numbered 2,109, and regimental assistant surgeons 3,882. By 1865, 547 surgeons and assistant surgeons of volunteers were appointed. These officers were listed on the muster-rolls, were permanently attached to their regiment, and were not detached unless an urgent situation arose. Each regiment contained a surgeon and an assistant surgeon commissioned by the state enlisting the troops. President Lincoln’s call for suppression of the rebellion in 1861, raised large numbers of state troops (militia). This system served well an army scattered over a large territory in commands of less than regimental strength ( there were approximately1,000 men in a regiment.) They were subject to duty whenever and wherever their services were required. These officers formed part of the General Staff of the army and were not permanently attached to any regiment or command. Its Medical Department was composed of a surgeon general, with the rank of colonel thirty surgeons, with the rank of major and eighty-four assistant surgeons, with the rank for the first five years of first lieutenant, and thereafter, until promotion to surgeon, the rank of captain. Your browser does not support the audio element.To understand the structure and function of Civil War hospitals, it is necessary to know the organization of the medical department of the pre-Civil War army and its subsequent development in the Union and Confederate Armies.īefore South Carolina seceded from the United States in December 1860, the small Regular Army consisted of 1,117 commissioned officers and 11,907 enlisted men. Listen to a recorded reading of this page:.Take a ten question quiz about this page.In 1886, twenty years after the Civil War, the U.S.She became the first woman to earn the Congressional Medal of Honor. The only woman to work as a doctor during the war was Mary Walker.Around 75% of amputee soldiers survived the operation.Because they were so good at performing amputations, doctors were nicknamed 'sawbones'.Interesting Facts about Civil War Medicine Medicine would advance significantly over the next several years, but it was too late for those wounded during the Civil War. While medicine had not advanced much since the middle ages, weapons had become very proficient at killing and causing horrible wounds. The era of the Civil War was a time when weapons were far more advanced than medicine. They died from a variety of diseases including dysentery, typhoid, malaria, and tuberculosis. Of the 620,000 soldiers who died during the Civil War, around 400,000 of them died from disease and not from fighting. They assisted the doctors, dressed wounds, and helped to feed the wounded. Thousands of women on both sides of the war volunteered to work as nurses in the hospitals. Doctors generally used drugs such as chloroform or ether to sedate patients before amputation. They became very proficient at amputation.įortunately, there were some forms of anesthesia at the time. This was the main type of surgery that doctors performed. The wounded arm, leg, or finger would just be cut off. Many soldiers became sick and died from infections.īecause there weren't any antibiotics to help cure infections, the only real treatment for wounds was amputation.

There were no antibiotics like Penicillin at the time, either. Due to the poor sanitary conditions of the hospitals and the doctors, many wounds became horribly infected. The biggest concern for the wounded was infection.

They didn't wash their hands or clean their medical instruments between surgeries. Doctors were unaware of how diseases spread. Many of the doctors serving during the Civil War had very little training and the training they did receive wasn't very good. Sometimes there wasn't enough room for all the wounded and they were just lined up on the ground outside.

#ESTABLISHED A WAR HOSPITAL FULL#

They quickly became dirty places full of disease and suffering. They were typically set up in barns or homes nearby the battlefield. The last place any soldier wanted to end up was in a Civil War field hospital.Ĭivil War field hospitals were horrible places. However, this was not the case at all during the Civil War. After all, they would be able to relax in a nice clean hospital and get looked after by expert doctors instead of fighting. You may think that some Civil War soldiers were glad to get wounded. American Civil War Civil War Medicine History > Civil War

Established a war hospital