Medicine in the Civil War

Medicine In The Civil War Those medical professionals who look back now at the techniques of Civil War doctors and hospitals are often found to be appalled. In our current eyes, medical professionals were untrained, uneducated, and frankly, stupid. The common medicines of the Civil War are now viewed by medical professionals as poisonous, lethal, and definitely dangerous. It is a statistical fact that more soldiers in the Civil War died from diarrhea than from …

…it became common practice for doctors to have a patient hold a bullet between their teeth to stop from screaming. Most often, infections would follow a surgical procedure. These infections, and not the loss of blood from the actual amputations, caused most of the deaths of the amputees. However despite the primitive conditions, and the death rate that seems to our modern eyes to be too high, many a soldier was "saved by the knife."