![]() At the field hospital, the more senior surgeons would assess the wounded man and fully treat his injuries. They would then send the soldier on to the field hospital, after giving him a drink of whiskey as a "stimulant" and an opium pill for pain. In rare instances they might have to "tie off" an artery for major bleeding. Here they only stopped active bleeding and performed simple bandaging. ![]() Some were in charge of "advance depots" or "dressing stations". Other medical officers were assigned duties with their regiments. Here the senior surgeons of each brigade performed the operations. Medical Director Letterman devised a system that created division hospitals and brigade operating teams. As George Adams, author of "Doctors in Blue", has written - "The Medical Corps contained many men with little or no surgical experience, but with an eagerness to acquire it, which they did at bitter cost to many a wounded man." Reforms were made where only the most experienced surgeons would actually do the operations. In the early days of the war these surgeons were described as "butchers". Some performed amputations without having any prior experience. Some surgeons learned by experimentation, and some tried to treat gunshot wounds without having done so before. These doctors served in the war as commissioned officers or in some cases as civilian "contract" surgeons. Their surgical training was, for the most part, minimal and their surgical practice limited to mostly minor cases - i.e. Some of the common problems of the soldiers after their surgeries will be explored and then a young Vermont soldier will be followed - from the time of his wounding on through his discharge and resumption of his life.Īt the onset of the Civil War few civilian doctors could claim a specialty in surgery. We will see how each of these injured the soldiers and what the surgeons did to help them. This section will take a look at the more overt enemies of the soldier: bullet, shell, and sabre. We had no sterilized gauze dressing, no gauze sponges.We knew nothing about antiseptics and therefore used none." So was written a description of the practice of surgery before the principles of asepsis and bacteriology came to be known. We dressed the wounds with clean but undisinfected sheets, shirts, tablecloths, or other old soft linen rescued from the family ragbag. If there was any difficulty in threading the needle we moistened it with bacteria laden saliva, and rolled it between bacteria-infected fingers. Our silk to tie blood vessels was undisinfected.The silk with which we sewed up all wounds was undisinfected. ![]() If a sponge or an instrument fell on the floor it was washed and squeezed in a basin of tap water and used as if it were clean. "We operated in old blood-stained and often pus-stained coats, the veterans of a hundred fights.We used undisinfected instruments from undisinfected plush-lined cases, and still worse, used marine sponges which had been used in prior pus cases and had been only washed in tap water. In 1918, a Federal surgeon, who had lived through the horrors of the Civil War, wrote:
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