Gemrig's Illustrated Surgical Instruments (1868)

[John Hartwell]

Gemrig's Illustrated Catalogue of Surgical Instruments (1868), includes 47 plates of period medical instruments and apparatus, can be downloaded for free from Thomas Jefferson University.

Sometimes terrifying. Something to poke your eyes with:

And, that's only one of four pages of "Eye Instruments."

 

[John Hartwell]

We so often hear horror stories about the "primitive" state of ACW-period medicine; and, compared to the 21st century, of course that's true. But, a great many of these implements are highly sophisticated, carefully designed for very specific purposes. We can also see that doctors were doing some amazingly ambitious things. Medical science had clearly come a long way. At the time men like Pasteur and Lister were hard at work laying the foundations for the great revolution in germ theory and antiseptic surgery that would come. When their work came to fruition, there was already a sound foundation of knowledge, expertise, and experience in place to take advantage of it.