Process Essay: The Role Of Doctors During The Civil War

Words: 886
Pages: 4

Michael Seider English Essay
Per.1 3/29/17

The Civil War was the most bloodiest war in American history with over 620,000 deaths and with mini ball bullets causing great damage to the bone and tissue advances in the medical field were vital. With nasty disease spreading quickly and killing most of the soldiers there needed to be methods to keep the death total down and get more soldiers onto the battlefield. Some of the methods used during the Civil War to help people stay alive were very disturbing but some very effective. With soldiers getting hurt and sick they needed a lot of doctors to help but many of the doctors had very little training and usually had
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So during the Civil War the medical field had to play a huge role so not everyone would die and to keep everything in order and help the soldiers to get back into the war.

With all the disease and injury during the civil war of course you would need doctors to treat those patients. The United States had about 55.000 doctors but most were poorly trained and had to go Europe to learn how to become a doctor. Even if the doctors had a good education at the time there was no correct theories of disease and no adequate specific theories, except for quinine for malaria, opiates for pain and vaccination for smallpox. The doctors usually had morphine to inject into the patient and and doctors usually anesthetized patients which helped the pain go away for a little bit helping the soldier feel better. Also the Civil War was fought before the germ theory so most doctors did not sanitize their tools as well as they should have which did not help at all. With not sanitizing tools the right way the spread of diseases like tetanus a nervous system disease, erysipelas an infection that ate away at your skin, hospital gangrene which was a combination of bacteria and pyemia spreading bacteria through the