Bleeding Blue and Gray
Medical Care During the Civil War
The Civil War was fought at the end of the medical Middle Ages.
Surgeon General William Hammond
The Civil War was a more widely fought conflict that involved more soldiers than any before in American history.
The Revolutionary War Battle of York involved 29,000 American, French, and British soldiers; contrast this with the Battle of Gettysburg, a single battle that involved 160,000 North and South soldiers on the field. The total number of deaths between 1861 and 1865 was roughly equal to casualties sustained in the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, the Mexican War, the Spanish-American War, World Wars I and II, and the Korean War combined, with a death rate six times that of World War II.
The state of medicine in the United States at the outbreak of the Civil War had progressed little since the Revolutionary War eighty-five years earlier. The medicine of the 1860s had hardly moved past the bleeding and purging that had contributed to Washington’s death.
While medical care lagged, the soldiers of the Civil War fought a modern war using Napoleon-style tactics. They fought this way because of the challenges to the command, communications, and control of armies. Once a battle started, the clouds of black powder, the deafening fire of thousands of…
