If an Army unit says in one place very long, flies and other bugs become an issue. Modern Armies issue bug nets and such to help with this issue. What was done during the Civil War to give soldiers a break from swarms of flies? Bug nets for soldiers to sleep under would help, but I have not seen this during the Civil War. Bug nets worn over the head can help, but again I see no evidence of this during the Civil War. Nets would help with mosquitoes as well.
Malaria from mosquitos was HUGE!!!:
"The Popular Dose with Doctors": Quinine and the American Civil War
During the American Civil War the North and South developed different strategies to treat malaria.
By
Robert D. Hicks | December 6, 2013
In 1862, the second year of the American Civil War, Southerners took satisfaction in knowing that invading Union army troops would succumb to tropical diseases endemic to the South's bayous, swamps, and coastal regions. Just wait until summer, Southern newspapers predicted.
The first test of this theory came in April 1862 in Shiloh, Tennessee, where Union General William T. Sherman's forces met the enemy in a bloody battle. Before and after the fight, typhoid, diarrhea, scurvy, and the fevers associated with malarial diseases ravaged troops on both sides. One physician wrote, "The pestilential atmosphere of the country about Shiloh was producing an amount of sickness almost without parallel in the history of the war." In May, Sherman mustered only half of his 10,000 troops because the other half were sick.
Many Civil War commanders required that their soldiers take quinine prophylactically. A woodcut from the March 11, 1865,
Harper's Weekly shows quinine rations being distributed to Union troops.
At Vicksburg, the disease-ravaged Union navy and army failed in its first attempt to capture the strategically important Southern city on the Mississippi River. One soldier observed that the gallinippers—slang for mosquitoes—were so thick about the camp that they "filled the air like rain drops." Mosquito nets, called bars, were not yet widely available, and soldiers exploded gunpowder cartridges in their tents to keep the pests away, unaware that they were the source of much of the illness gripping the encampments. (It would be another 20 years before doctors began to suspect mosquitoes were to blame for malaria and yellow fever.) Almost three-quarters of the besieging Union troops were dead or too sick to work. Vicksburg's defenders were no better off, described by a Union army commander as "haggard & care-worn." One of the defending officers wrote, "The command suffers greatly from intermittent fever, and is generally debilitated from the long exposure and inaction of the trenches."
Pestilential Warfare
Southern military physicians, all of whom were titled surgeons, took no satisfaction in the malarial outbreaks that decimated the ranks of their opponents. Disease takes no sides. South Carolina Surgeon Francis Peyre Porcher, who knew intimately the devastation caused by tropical diseases, attended to sick and wounded soldiers in several hospitals before his assignment to the Naval Hospital in Norfolk, Virginia. His patients arrived in Norfolk from all theaters of war, and when he looked eastward to the sea, the distant masts of blockading Union ships reminded him of supply shortages and the medicines he badly needed. Porcher worried especially about the scarcity of quinine, the closest thing to a miracle drug known to Civil War physicians.
FEA2_4_for_web_0.jpg
A census map from 1870 displays the proportion of malaria-based deaths compared with total deaths in the United States at the time. In the reddest areas at least 14% of the deaths were attributed to malarial diseases.
Malaria, yellow fever, and other tropical diseases had several symptoms in common, including fevers, chills, and nausea. In the early stages of these diseases Civil War physicians gauged the illness by the frequency of recurring fever, hence "intermittent," "remittent," "tertiary," or "quotidian" fevers. Physicians of the time did not connect mosquitoes to malaria, but they did know quinine was a sure way to ease its symptoms. The problem was getting and administering the drug, especially getting it in quantity.
The Southern Solution
Quinine is an alkaloid synthesized from the bark of cinchona, a tree native to South America. The Northern blockade of Southern ports made importing quinine difficult, and smuggling from Northern or European sources proved unreliable. Northerners had intercepted quinine in the heads of girls' dolls and found it stuffed within the intestines of slaughtered animals. The need for quinine was desperate.The need for quinine was desperate. One South Carolinian wrote ...
(I myself carry Quinine tins in my spy/smuggler impersonation at reenactments and living histories! 
)
Rest of Article: https://www.sciencehistory.org/dist...th-doctors-quinine-and-the-american-civil-war
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