I was just working on a long post and getting ready to hit send, Bee. LOL! So here it is, by pure coincidence showing up seconds after your reply.
I'm curious--I could look it up but I'm lazy--how painful a condition was this? It sounds quite painful. What was used to treat the pain other than the usual morphine? Okay, I got a little less lazy. From
Remarks on the Pathological Anatomy of Osteomyelitis, with Cases. By H. Allen, M. D., Asst. Surgeon U. S. A.
"Military surgeons have doubtless observed, during the present war, the liability of gunshot injuries of bone, to be followed by severe symptoms. In addition to secondary hemorrhage and gangrene, which are so apt to attack any wounds in those labouring under a scorbutic taint and malarial influences, injuries to a bone expose to the dangers of
osteomyelitis—to pyarthrosis when the fractured or resected region is in the neighbourhood of an important joint—and to many risks of death from prolonged suppuration and pyemia."
He doesn't talk about pain much in the article, so maybe I'm wrong and this isn't a particularly painful condition. The whole article is quite detailed, for anyone interested in this, from January 1865.
Here's another shorter article from 1865, an accident to a teenager in Boston, not a soldier, but could have happened to anyone. There was an amputation, and the boy eventually died. "Subcutaneous injections of morphine were the essential treatment [for pain]." His stump was healed well by the time he died. Apparently osteomyelitis was "a pathological
condition of comparative recent investigation," and the author recommends (by pure coincidence I ran into this!) the article I quoted above by military doctor H. Allen! I wonder how old a condition it was, considering all those bone injuries in, well, every war. How odd--it must have been seen and classified as something else, in the days before an understanding of particular microbes causing particular infections.
Long-term antibiotic therapy is recommended today of course, according to Wikipedia, but this is interesting, from Wikipedia's standard main heading for osteomyopathy (don't want a big long scrolling box of text to appear so I'll just describe the link like that):
"
Prior to the widespread availability and use of antibiotics, blow fly larvae were sometimes deliberately introduced to the wounds to feed on the infected material, effectively scouring them clean. In 1875, American artist Thomas Eakins depicted a surgical procedure for osteomyelitis at Jefferson Medical College, in a famous oil painting titled The Gross Clinic."
First, blow-fly larvae? Really? Why only for osteomyelitis and not other things with infected tissue, or were they used for other things, or was it because the treatment needed to continue so long? Here's one of their footnotes from the 1930s--the other is from more modern date and might not be available:
http://m.jbjs.org/content/13/3/438.abstract I've only read the abstract, but it just looks like the obvious stuff you'd want to do to a wound. I wonder if the full pdf explains how you sterilize the blowflies--make them wash their little tiny feet with good soap, and wear little rubber booties, maybe? Or more seriously, maybe keep them in a sterile area for a few days feeding only sterile food?
Secondly, I didn't know that famous painting of the Gross Clinic was a scene showing treatment for osteomyelitis. (Can't everyone who's studied the history of medicine picture it right now, even though it's a little later than the Civil War by just 10 years maybe? Or have I given away my nerd status? Oops.)
It's so strange I studied this kind of stuff 15-20 years ago as a mere Civil War-era curiosity, and now I'm interested in it for real. Yep, subcutaneous injections of morphine, they tried that, problem was that it couldn't be done by a home nurse and nobody wants to spend life in the hospital... I don't have osteomyelitis but the pain treatments
might be the same--I'm always curious what's out there.