This is a lecture I have given a few times and am converting to a long blog post. The American Civil War was the first major war since a number of major advances of medicine had occurred. Sanitation had been studied by John Snow and Florence Nightingale. Anesthesia had been discovered by two Americans, Morton and
Unfortunately, antisepsis would not be described until, 1867, after the war. Infection than was the great scourge of the wounded.
The state of medical art before the war was limited.
Baron Larrey was the greatest army surgeon of the Napoleonic Wars. He invented the ambulance and pioneered some sanitary advances but the cause of infection was still obscure.
Benjamin Rush was a famous American physician but little of what he knew or advocated was of use.
The discovery of Ether anesthesia was momentous but it did add the factor that more operations would be attempted before infection was understood.
Semmelweiss was tragic figure who realized that infection was transmissible from physicians’ hands to patients but he was unable to convince his colleagues. His discovery of the uses of hand washing were ignored.
Florence Nightingale discovered the use of hand washing in caring for the wounded but she did not know why it worked. She is a great hero of the British Army and her apartment in Scutari Barracks in Istanbul is preserved in a shrine.
The Scutari Barracks from across the Bosphorus.
I visited the museum about ten years ago and visited her quarters which the Turkish Army preserves.
The history of Military Medicine really begins with Ambrose Pare’ who served several French Kings and who invented the hemostat.
His methods were a huge improvement on the Greeks but not much else can be said for their efficacy.
The American Army in 1860 was tiny and the medical establishment was a joke.
The war resulted in many of the army surgeons resigning to join the Confederacy. The lack of military medical texts resulted in Samuel D Gross, professor of surgery at Jefferson Medical College, writing his own textbook.
To be continued.
Tags: health care, science
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