For all of time there have been wars and as a result of those wars there were injuries.

For many centuries there was no way to treat these injuries But in the 1800s medicine was just starting to develop and many methods of treatment that would be unheard of now were very common and usual. During the civil war even though there was so much advancement in the medical field there was still very little known about viruses and infections, in fact there was so little known that there were more deaths from infections than projectiles. During the Civil War many solders suffered from combat injuries and illness related to the war as a result of this there were many advances made in medicine, surgery, nursing and public health. There were many kinds of ammunition on the battle field that could wound a solder including Minnie balls, musket balls, cannon balls, and artillery shells. All of these different kinds of ammunition made different kinds of wounds, for instance a Minnie Ball would usually hit very close to the target and if it didnt instantly kill you it would hit bone and cause a very large amount of internal bleeding which would also kill you. In addition to the immediate consequences of a bullet wound there is also the risk of injury there is also the risk of infection, if a musket ball or Minne Ball was to be taken out of infection and lead poisoning. As we know now lead is very bad to have ingested lead or to have it break through the skin, as well as the risk of lead poisoning there is also the risk of infections there are many different infections that one could get in the field. If you had an open wound you could get infections like gangrene. There was also the risk of a solder getting a parasite like hookworm from the horrible sanitation. The first one of these secondary consequences that Ill talk about is infections. There are many different kinds of infections but the one thing that most infections do is inflame the place they have infected causing swelling, the swelling is caused by white blood cells attacking the virus and causing swelling There were many injuries and fatalities on the battlefield during the Civil War; in fact, it was one of the bloodiest wars in American history. Historians estimate that the total number of deaths during the Civil War was at least 618,000 men, and possibly as many as 700,000. It is hard to arrive at an exact number because of inaccurate record keeping, especially on the Confederate side. One expert who studied the records of forty-eight major battles, the Union forces had 112 injured men for every 100o soldiers in battle, while the Confederates suffered 150 injured for every 1000 men. # This is still just a rough estimate. Although there are many reasons for such major casualties in this war, one of the biggest reasons is that both sides were using new weaponry along with old fighting tactics. For example, the troops would stand in lines, or bunched together, shooting at the members of other army, just as soldiers had fought in the Revolutionary War. There were no flanking techniques; that is, the troops wouldnt try to go behind each others lines. Instead, they would just face each other head on. However, there had been some major advances in the weaponry

they were using. Before the Civil War, guns used musket balls (round balls made out of lead) were used as ammunition. Just before the start of this war, a new design for the bullet was perfected. This type of ammunition was called the Minnie ball. Minnie balls looked more like a bullet, and were much more accurate. They could also be reloaded into the musket almost eight times faster. The combination of more accurate bullets, more rounds fired, used with oldfashioned tactics that exposed soldiers to more rounds of ammunition, made for many more casualties. Surgical techniques to deal with bullet wounds were fairly primitive. Because there were so many wounded, the most frequently performed procedure was amputation of a limb. If a soldier was shot in any place besides his torso or head, surgeons would typically amputate the limb. In fact, a good surgical team could amputate a limb in ten minutes or less. Anesthesia in this time was also very primitive. The two main anesthetic agents were chloroform, ether, and alcohol. If a soldier hit in the torso or head did not die of internal bleeding, he would almost always die of an infection. People typically think that during wars most soldiers die from direct combat wounds, and in our time, that is probably true. During the Civil War, however, there were more deaths caused by infection than by direct combat wounds. This is mostly because there were no antibiotics at the time, and thus no way to treat wounds that became infected. Also, sanitary conditions in and around camps were appalling. For example, there were no latrines but only open pits. Neither drinking nor washing water was filtered; as a consequence, people contracted water-borne infections like typhoid fever and dysentery. Typhoid fever is caused by the salmonella bacteria, which is present in food like meat or eggs when they are not properly cooked, Parasites, like hookworm, were a major problem. They were transmitted through fecal contamination in the open pits that served as latrines. Malaria, which is spread by a parasite hosted by mosquitoes, was rampant. Malaria was common in areas near swamps, where mosquitoes could breed in the stagnant water. People in living in close proximity to one another spread another group of diseases. For example, tuberculosis, which is caused by a bacterium, which is spread by droplets when an infected person coughs, was very common in the encampments of soldiers. Younger soldiers, who might have grown up on farms or in sparsely populated areas, were more likely to get common childhood diseases because they had never been exposed to them. So they might actually die from measles, mumps, rubella, and whooping cough. Because of the newness of medicine there were not many treatments for these sicknesses. There were only ways to prevent it. Building pit toilets of latrines could have prevented the hookworm. And quarantining the infected patients could have prevented the tuberculosis. There were so many simple steps that could have been taken but were not known of.

Women of the Civil War period wanted to help their country but werent allowed to fight. So they took jobs nursing injured soldiers. The army needed people to nurse the soldiers back to health after they had been wounded, although they did not realize how many wounded would need to be cared for. Most of these women worked in hospitals; the wounded were brought to these hospitals in wagons. Clara Barton, who was one of these nurses, wanted to treat the soldiers where they fell. So she and some other women decided that they would act as medics and treat the fallen soldiers with basic care before they were carted off to the hospitals. Dorothea Dix was the superintendent of all females nurses for the Union forces. She recruited and supervised all the nurses. She insisted be over the age of thirty and plain in appearance; She did not want the soldiers being treated by nurses in the hope that they would fall in love with them. Instead, she wanted responsible, thick-skinned women to do the job. At the beginning of the Civil War, surgical techniques were very limited, but over the course of the war doctors were able to experiment with all sorts of surgical techniques. They were able to better take out bullets and clean wounds. Another part of surgery is the sterilization of the operating area. Even though the operating areas were in the field, and hard to sanitize, the doctors became better at cleaning surgical implements to prevent the spread of infection. Anesthesia was another important practice of medicine that was improved on throughout the war. Although doctors used the same types of anesthesia throughout the war--predominantly chloroform, ether, and alcohol, they improve at prescribing more accurate doses of anesthesia for individual soldiers, instead of prescribing the same amount for everybody. To some extent, this was forced on them by the rationing of medical supplies. During the war, doctors also improved upon their use of non-surgical techniques to treat soldiers. At the beginning of the war most wounds on the extremities were usually amputated. But after the final months of the war bullets were removed more often than they were in the beginning. This technically not an advance but a change in medicine during the war another advance in medicine as a result of the war was the realm of public health. During the civil war Conditions were very horrible and dirty. There were more deaths from infected wounds and other sicknesses than they are from bullets. The civil war was a experiment ground for new medical techniques, some of them good some of them bad and they were eventually perfected some are still used today. The civil war also showed us what didn't work like bloodletting a technique of sucking out blood to reduce inflammation. Medicine developed during the civil war was very important to the development of modern medicine.