Chapter 7-Afterword

While the Northern hospitals faced their fair share of problems regarding the conditions and the task of treating so many patients, Southern hospitals faced a more dire situation. Due to the blockade and lacking the industrialization that the North enjoyed before the start of the war, the South just did not have enough medical supplies to adequately attend to the flood of injured soldiers they began to face. Throughout the war, Southern doctors faced shortages in everything they needed to be able to help the wounded soldiers recover and send them back to the fight. They lacked in medicine, clean clothes, bandages, mattresses, and anything else that would make the soldiers' life more comfortable. They frequently turned to the government, but even they were unable to supply the hospitals due to the blockade, lack of reliable transportation, and the ever-obvious swath of destruction the Union Army caused while invading the South. The goal of hospitals back then was to help a soldier recover in order to return him back to his unit and back to the fight. The lack of materials caused this goal to be unreachable, and few soldiers were able to return to the fight healthy if at all. In fact, upon arriving to the hospital, many soldiers deserted the army altogether and returned home instead of returning to face the horrors of war again. They knew that the hospital would not be able to feed them, clothe them, or adequately care for them, making it all the more likely that they would either starve to death or die from their wounds. Southern prisoner-of-war camps were not much better. They too suffered from shortages in adequate materials to support the large numbers of Union prisoners. This caused a very high mortality rate among prisoners in the South compared to the North. Overall, however, neither the North or the South took very well care of their prisoners, causing many deaths that could have been prevented.
Due to the Civil War, doctors around the country learned many valuable things about their trade. They learned how to better care for the wounded depending on what kind of injury they had suffered, that quarantine and disinfectants could help stop the spread of disease, and also a lot knowledge about the anatomical aspect of the human body. The knowledge learned during the war helped stop the spread of diseases in later years, as in the smallpox, cholera, and yellow fever outbreaks that happened after the war. It also helped lead to research that helped discover even more technological advances in the future that led to an overall safer standard of living.

Chapters 4-6

Millions of soldiers were sent to hospitals around the country during the Civil War from diseases due to camp conditions or from battle wounds. Most of these soldiers had never been to a hospital before, since at that time hospitals were for travelers or poorer people. They had always been cared for by their families, mainly the women of their families, until they were well enough. So, when soldiers started to pour in from distant battlefields or from camping armies, they were in for a surprise when the hospital was nothing like what they were used to. The doctors, who were mostly male, had no clue that a good environment and morale among the sick and wounded helped them recover faster and improved mortality rates. Women, on the other hand, knew this, since they had spent their entire lives caring for men when they became sick. Women wanted to help these men recover, and they sought out ways in order to accomplish that. Through the United States Sanitary Commission, created to send supplies out to armies and hospitals that were desperately needed, women began to send needed materials to the men that helped many recover from their wounds. These included blankets, clothing, bedding, bandages, and other critical materials that made their lives easier. However, the organization that they worked through, the United States Sanitary Commission, was not without its critics. Many believed that they took the materials and donations they received for themselves through corrupt agents and doctors. This was mostly untrue, and without the efforts of this organization, many more lives would have been lost due to diseases, camp conditions, hospital conditions, and the lack of materials needed by almost every army and hospital that existed during the war.

Intro-Chapter 3

Intro-Chapter 3

When the Civil War broke out in 1861, thousands of men rushed to join the ranks of both the Union and the Confederate Armies. They had visions of glorious battles, where they would fight heroically and be welcome back home as heroes to their own countries. However, no one even thought once of the thousands of wounded and dead that a battle can produce, and that each of these men would need medical care once the battles were over and even as the battle raged on around them. By the beginning of the Civil War, there were relatively few doctors and even fewer hospitals, and the ones that were already there were incapable of handling all the wounded that each battle caused. At the start, th medical practices the doctors used were both technologically advanced for the time and out of date at the same time to help the thousands of wounded.The doctors used anesthesia, in the form of either ether or chloroform, instead of bloodletting, which had fallen out of favor. Doctors used quinine when available and alcohol to stop fevers, purgatives or opium for diarrhea, and mercury to improve liver function. For serious limb injuries, the doctor had no choice but to amputate the limb to avoid infection and losing the soldier.These techniques helped save millions of lives, as long as they were in the care of doctors that knew what they were doing with the treatments and were not corrupt. During the battle or after it, ambulance crews went to pick up the wounded to transport them to a field hospital. If the injury was serious enough, they would then be transported over large areas of the country to general hospitals, where the soldier could stay and recuperate. 

Though most doctors were men, a few women had already been able to achieve being a doctor by the time the war broke out. Most women, however, worked as nurses in the hospitals. Women reformers and relief organizions sought to improve these women's status to professional nurse, with much criticism from other doctors and around the nation. 

Healthcare Before the 1920's

Before the 1920's, there were some various techniques of healthcare that in today's time might have seen as mediocre to just plain cruel. People back then were forced to use the resources and materials that were at hand, and these were often ineffective or tended to make things worse for the patient. Hospitals were rarely used back in those days, and most medical treatment was performed by women on their own family members in their own house. The treatments they used mostly just succeeded in making the patient comfortable enough and let their own body fight whatever illness they had. This was considered the best treatment, since hospitals were few and far between and it usually made things worse to try to travel with the sick person all the way to one. Also, doctors back then did not know much about how to fight various diseases, so most people considered going to the hospital a death sentence. They thought that they would rather die in the comfort of their own home surrounded by their loved ones rather than in a nasty, dirty hospital with doctors that did not know at all what they were doing for the most part. There were few women doctors, if any at all, and men did not know how to make the patients more comfortable by providing certain things like baths and healthy food. Male doctors often overlooked these little things that women who were used to dealing with these things would have remembered. Most of the practices that doctors used only made things worse, and few patients ever recovered fully from their stay at the hospital. Luckily, as the years passed, technology and therefore medicine and medical practices began to improve slowly, and the hospital began to start becoming not so much of a death sentence as it was once viewed as.