Outcome of Medical Advances During the Civil War

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In the early part of the war, Benjamin Howard, a lowly young assistant surgeon, was shuttled to the sidelines with medical grunt work: changing bandages, suturing wounds, and grabbing grub for the docs. But when the other surgeons decided there was no point in treating chest wounds, Howard experimented with a new life-saving procedure. At the onset of the war, a sucking chest wound was almost certainly a death sentence. The negative pressure in the thorax was created by the opening in the chest cavity, often causing the lungs to collapse, leading to suffocation. Howard found that if he closed the wound with metal sutures, followed by alternating layers of lint or linen bandages and a few drops of collodion, he could create an airtight seal.

Carlton Burgan a 20-year-old private had survived pneumonia, but the mercury pills he took as a treatment led to gangrene, which quickly spread from his mouth to his eye and led to the removal of his right cheekbone. In a pioneering series of operations in 1862, a surgeon from City Hospital in New York used dental and facial fixtures to fill in the missing bone until Burgan’s face regained its shape. The doctor was Gurdon Buck, now considered the father of modern plastic surgery. During the war, he and other Union surgeons completed 32 revolutionary “plastic operations” on disfigured soldiers. Buck was the first to photograph the progress of his repairs and the first to make gradual changes over several operations.

In final consideration, the 1860’s was crucial time for medicine, the Civil War only helped medicine advance at this time. If there weren’t to be abundant of soldiers near death, theses doctors wouldn’t have put their minds and knowledge together to establish these advancements at this time in the 1860’s. The thousands of injuries/deaths forced the doctors and nurses to further their knowledge with “trial and error” until the finding of a solution. At the start of the war, merely all the doctors would be considered now of days amatures of medicine, by 1865 they were becoming the founders of today's standard medicine. Although many lives were lost on the battlefield due to practice of these new medical techniques, all in all more lives were saved.

Cited Sources

- Civil War Rx: The Source Guide to Civil War Medicine

Carole Adrienne. “Medical Advances Timeline: 1861-1865”

http://civilwarrx.blogspot.com/2011/09/medical-advances-timeline-1861-1865.html

- Ian Dixon. “Civil War Medicine: Modern Medicine’s Civil War Legacy” http://www.civilwar.org/education/history/civil-war-medicine/civil-war-medicine.html?referrer=https://www.google.com/

- John S. Haller. “Battlefield Medicine: A History of the Military Ambulance from the Napoleonic Wars through World War I” Southern Illinois University

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