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14 - Civil War Health and Medicine

from Part II - Managing the War

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 October 2019

By
Shauna Devine
Edited by
Aaron Sheehan-Dean
Aaron Sheehan-Dean
Affiliation:
Louisiana State University
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Summary

Dr. Brown-Séquard lectured about various forms of wound trauma, injuries to the nerves, spinal cord trauma and fracture, heart disease, tetanus, and epilepsy – a range of conditions that were afflicting the Union troops. He discussed the challenges of diagnosing and treating these conditions, the possibilities of experimental medicine and blood transfusions as a cure, and the groundbreaking research of Dr. Silas Weir Mitchell, a leading researcher and physician at the newly formed Turner’s Lane Hospital – all of which would hopefully provide answers on better managing the conditions of war trauma. This 1864 lecture, one of many during the war, which was attended by more than 100 physicians in the DC area, highlights the unique training and learning environment that was created to manage the quantity, variety, and impact of the diseases encountered during the Civil War.

Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge History of the American Civil War , pp. 268 - 292
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2019

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References

Key Works

Adams, George Worthington. Doctors in Blue: The Medical History of the Union Army in the Civil War (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1952).Google Scholar
Bollet, Alfred. Civil War Medicine: Challenges and Triumphs (Tucson, AZ: Galen Press, 2002).Google Scholar
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Codell Carter, K. The Rise of Causal Concepts of Disease (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003).Google Scholar
Cunningham, H. H. Doctors in Gray: The Confederate Medical Service (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1958).Google Scholar
Devine, Shauna. Learning from the Wounded: The Civil War and the Rise of American Science (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2014).Google Scholar
Flannery, Michael. Civil War Pharmacy: A History (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2017).Google Scholar
Green, Carol C. Chimborazo: The Confederacy’s Largest Hospital (Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 2004).Google Scholar
Humphreys, Margaret. Marrow of Tragedy: The Health Crisis of the American Civil War (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013).Google Scholar
Rothstein, William. American Physicians in the 19th Century: From Sects to Science (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985).Google Scholar
Sappol, Michael. A Traffic of Dead Bodies: Anatomy and Embodied Social Identity in Nineteenth-Century America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002).Google Scholar
Stowe, Steven. Doctoring the South: Southern Physicians and Everyday Medicine in the Mid-Nineteenth-Century South(Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2004).Google Scholar
Tomes, Nancy. The Gospel of Germs: Men, Women and the Microbe in American Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998).Google Scholar
Warner, John Harley. Against the Spirit of the System: The French Impulse in Nineteenth-Century American Medicine (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998).Google Scholar

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