What medical problems did Union and Confederate soldiers face?

Answer 1

On both sides disease killed two soldiers for every one the enemy killed. Everybody was a farmer before the war, and they had never been anywhere past the county seat, and had little schooling, so, most of them had never had the usual childhood diseases, like measles, mumps and chicken pox. At the start of the war when the men were being formed into units and going off to training camps there was a period of time for each new unit of "putting them through the fevers", when these and other maladies made their appearance. By the time this was over a new regiment of one thousand men commonly had lost one-third to one-half its strength, in dead and men given medical discharges.

The war was fought about fifteen years before medical men figured out that there were these things called germs that caused many diseases. During the war doctors still thought in terms of "ill humors" or "miasmas", and consequently, proper camp sanitation and anti-septic medical practices were practiced only by officers others generally regarded as over-fastidious. In those circumstances diseases like dysentery, typhoid fever and even cholera, caused by drinking water polluted with human waste, were terrifically deadly. Small pox was also a deadly killer, though it had been understood since the late 1700s how to inoculate people against it - you took a scab off of a pox sore from someone who had these disease, cut the scab up into little bits with a knife, made a little cut on the arm of the person to be "vaccinated", and inserted a bit of the scab in the cut. This produced a mild case of the disease (with any luck, only a mild case) and was enough to provide immunity. In coastal areas of the south, where there was much action, malaria and Yellow Fever, spread by mosquitos, were a threat.

If wounded in battle and taken to a hospital it was a lucky soldier who survived the medical treatment. Again, doctors did not yet have any idea of germs, and went from one patient to another with bloody hands and bloody surgical instruments, creating infections where none had been before. (When President Lincoln was shot more than one doctor, eager to help, plunged a bare, unwashed finger into the hole in his head, probing for the bullet). Before the Civil War there were many types of physicians - hydropaths, naturopaths, osteopaths and so on. The War was a great boost to the primacy of the surgeons, though, who believed in "plucking it out and casting it from thee", and were enthusiastic amputators. (After the war, in 1869, the surgeons took control of the medical profession by forming the American Medical Association and having each state pass a law forbidding non-surgical practices as "the unauthorized practice of medicine" - a control by the surgeons which persists to this day). Civil War bullets were huge and heavy, and if they hit bone, the bone would splinter, and the only remedy the doctors knew was to cut off the arm or leg (for a year or two after the war, one-sixth of the entire budget of the state of Mississippi went to buy peg legs and hooks for its Confederate veterans). This was done with unwashed instruments, and in the south, due to the naval blockade preventing the importation of medical supplies, without any anesthesia (ether or chloroform were all that was known) or pain killer (morphia), other than maybe a swallow of whiskey, and a bullet to bite on. In big battles there are many reports of men passing by the makeshift hospitals and noticing the great and ever growing pile of amputated arms and legs tossed out the window by the doctors. A bullet through the body was basically untreatable, and though there are remarkable stories of survival, usually fatal. Head wounds were almost always hopeless. If a soldier lived through his turn on the table with the surgeons, he was laid in filthy straw, unchanged until five or six men had died in it, and bandaged, possibly even with clean, previously unused strips of cloth (unsterilized, of course). He might get fed, and he might get some water, and some nursing from the all male nurses, but basically if he was to live it was up to his body to fight off the infections and heal itself.

Answer 2

Killed family