Experience Medical Practices During the Civil War

Story and photos
by Kathleen Walls

The National Museum of Civil War Medicine in Frederick, Maryland is a deep dive into what it was like to be a sick or wounded soldier in the Civil War. In many ways, it was a horror story, but it showed how doctors then led to modern medical practices. It dispels the myth that the doctors then were quacks. Doctors for both the Union and Confederate Army were educated doctors who had to pass rigorous tests before they were accepted as surgeons. They followed a scientific approach to medicine rather than a belief in folklore medicine. This is one of the most interesting museums I've visited.

The exhibit of a typical camp shows how unsanitary conditions led to disease. In the camps, we see all these men crowded together, living together in conditions that are conducive to illness and disease. Medical personnel didn't believe in germs, and more soldiers died from dysentery and infections than wounds. In many cases amputations resulted from infections that could have been prevented by simply washing hands.

Yet, the learning experiences of field doctors laid the foundation for America's modern medical system. A surgeon named Jonathan Letterman was appointed medical director of the Army of the Potomac. He instituted sanitary reforms like having latrines covered with soil daily and moving them away from water sources. He has camps set up in a more orderly fashion where animals are separated from people. The common belief at the time was that bad air caused disease, but his measures also improved sanitation and the spread of germs.There are books about Civil war medicine at Amazon that tell more about what it was like for surgeons then..

Another exhibit shows a wounded soldier being loaded into an early ambulance. I never knew there were no ambulances in the US before the Civil War. Wounded men sometimes lay on the battlefield for a week. Many of them died in the fields, because they didn't get help. In August 1862, Letterman started an ambulance corps in the Army of the Potomac. One of the first ambulances used by the United States military was a four-wheeled vehicle that held 6 to 12 wounded men seated, or four men lying down. The back seats could move.

One of the most moving exhibits shows an amputation with an assistant giving ether. When the doctors amputated a limb, often gangrene set in and killed many patients. By about 1863, they learned that carbolic acid cures gangrene if you inject it or pour it on the infected limb. But it's extremely caustic, so it will kill good tissue as well.

Soon, Middleton Goldsmith, a Union surgeon in Tennessee, begins spraying a mineral called bromine into the air, because it smelled clean. Remember all of them believed bad smells spread disease. Soon, he noticed in his ward that he had fewer cases of gangrene, and the ones that he had were not very severe. Goldsmith realized the only thing he was doing differently than everyone else was spraying the bromine.

He injected bromine liquid into the gangrenous wound of a soldier three days a week, and it cured the gangrene. He didnn't know why, but it's not caustic. It doesn't burn good tissue like the other stuff. So he tells the other surgeons at this hospital. When this works, he wrote a report, sent it to the Surgeon General's office, and they accepted it and recommended bromine use. In the North, gangrenous deaths dropped from 30 and 40% to 4% by the end of the war.

The museum tells of not only field hospitals but the city hospitals for military. During the Civil War, the Confederacy's largest hospital, Chimborazo Hospital, was in Richmond, Virginia. Today, the site is home to Chimborazo Park and the Chimborazo Medical Museum. For the Union, DC and Philadelphia had large hospital centers as well. Philadelphia had Satterlee Hospital where Clark Park is today.

This is just a touch of what you will see there. There is so much more you need to go see for yourself. The museum offers self-guided tours, or if you have a group of 20 or more you can book a guided tour.

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