How many medics were in the civil war?

Answer 1

None, in the modern sense of a man with medical training who was part of front-line units, ready to give immediate care to the wounded. Medical treatment was still very primitive. Every regiment had a surgeon, and often an assistant surgeon. A regiment was supposed to have one thousand men, but for most of the war usually had 300-600. Every regiment also had a band, and usually the band members served as stretcher bearers during battles. This was nowhere near enough men to carry away the wounded to field hospitals, where the surgeons worked, if the battle was a large one. Medical resources were completely inadequate on both sides. Many wounded men lay on the battlefield for days before being removed for their first treatment. If the army had to retreat after a battle they would be accompanied by horse drawn ambulances and regular wagons full of agonized wounded men, as the wagons jounced over the rutted dirt roads, churned up by the passage of thousands of men and horses.

Physicians of the day did not even know of the germ theory of disease. They worked on one man after another without washing their hands or their bloody instruments.

Civil War weapons fired very large, heavy bullets. If a man was hit in the arm or the leg and the bullet struck the bone, it would almost always shatter the bone, and the only thing the doctors could do was amputate the wounded limb. If a man was shot in the head or the body, the doctors could do little for him and if he recovered it was mostly a matter of luck. Most hospitals were sinkholes of disease and surviving hospitalization was not easy.

These are among the reasons why disease killed two-thirds of Civil War soldiers who died; two for every one the enemy killed.