Civil War Medicine
By: Rick Lafrance
Background
Medical Innovations of the Civil War
Life saving Amputatuions
The Anesthesia Inhaler
In 1863, Stonewall Jackson’s surgeon recommended the removal of his left arm, which had been badly damaged by friendly fire. When a chloroform-soaked cloth was placed over his nose, the Confederate general, in great pain, muttered, “What an infinite blessing,” before going limp.
Closing Chest Wounds
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. Among French soldiers shot in the chest during the Crimean War (1853–1856), only 8 percent survived. The problem, as Howard came to realize, wasn’t the wound itself, but the sucking. The negative pressure in the thorax was created by the opening in the chest cavity. The effect often caused the lungs to collapse, leading to suffocation. The cub doctor 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 (a syrupy solution that forms an adhesive film when it dries), he could create an airtight seal. Survival rates quadrupled, and Howard’s innovation soon became standard treatment.
Facial Reconstruction
Carleton Burgan of Maryland was in terrible shape. The 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. He was willing to try anything. 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. He also pioneered the use of tiny sutures to minimize scarring. To some, it seemed pretty wacky, like sci-fi for the 19th century. An Illinois newspaper enthusiastically and erroneously described the new treatments: “Such is the progress of the medical department in these parts that half of a man’s face demolished by a ball or piece of shell is replaced by a cork face!”
The Ambulance-to-ER system
The Union went into the First Battle of Bull Run on July 21, 1861, expecting a mere skirmish. The rebels brought a war. Although 1,011 Union soldiers were wounded, empty ambulances led the retreat to Washington, D.C. Most of the civilian drivers at the time were untrained and “of the lowest character,” according to Dr. Henry Ingersoll Bowditch, an activist whose son died after lying wounded for hours following a charge. Many were cowards or drunkards, he added. It took Jonathan Letterman, the medical director of the Army of the Potomac, just six weeks to implement a brilliant system to evacuate and care for the wounded, becoming the model for the ambulance-to-ER system we know today. On September 17, 1862, the Battle of Antietam left 2,108 Union soldiers dead and nearly 10,000 wounded. Letterman established caravans of 50 ambulances, each with a driver and two stretcher bearers, to ferry the injured to field hospitals. He hired private wagons to carry medical supplies to circumvent enemy damage to railroad lines. He even introduced spring suspensions to ambulances and added a lock box under the driver’s seat to make it harder for soldiers to steal protein, bedsacks, and morphine reserved for the wounded. The rest is history.