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.