Help with a research paper

[Manassas 1861]

I need to do a research paler for my English class.my topic is about the physical affects of war. Does anybody have any accounts I can use regarding the wounded and killed during the war?

 

[RedRover]

There are not only those physically injured in battle by enemy (or friendly) fire, killed, mortally wounded, or just wounded in some degree. There were also non-battle casualties, or those suffering injury on accident in camp, field, or due to illness.

Disease of course was deadlier than combat, and not a few men were physically weakened or wrecked by severe illness.

The Medical and Surgical History of the War volumes give many of the gory statistics.

The Medical and Surgical History of the War of the Rebellion. (1861-65).

www.google.com

Livermore's "Numbers and Losses" gives the following calculation of killed and wounded, etc.

p. 47-48.

Numbers and Losses in the Civil War in America, 1861-1865

www.google.com

Modern statistical data on Confederate losses suggests something more like half a million.

Historian revises estimate of Civil War dead

Historian J. David Hacker’s new estimate of Civil War dead challenges long-held views about the human and psychic costs of the conflict.

discovere.binghamton.edu

How Many Died in the American Civil War? | HISTORY

The U.S. Civil War was the nation's deadliest conflict, but debate remains over the total estimate of fatalities.

www.history.com

Folks often associate civil war battlefield surgery with amputation. They didn't always amputate, but did so lots of times. Here's a hair-raising account of the effects of having one's limb lopped off and its aftermath by Private Winchell of Company D, 1st US Sharpshooters was wounded in the arm at Gaines' Mill in the summer of 1862, and captured.
His arm was amputated without anesthesia...

From Steven's history of the Berdan Sharpshooters, 1892, page 519 to read the whole gruesome tale...

Berdan's United States Sharpshooters in the Army of the Potomac, 1861-1865

www.google.com

 

[Manassas 1861]

There are not only those physically injured in battle by enemy (or friendly) fire, killed, mortally wounded, or just wounded in some degree. There were also non-battle casualties, or those suffering injury on accident in camp, field, or due to illness.

Disease of course was deadlier than combat, and not a few men were physically weakened or wrecked by severe illness.

The Medical and Surgical History of the War volumes give many of the gory statistics.

The Medical and Surgical History of the War of the Rebellion. (1861-65).

www.google.com

View attachment 540543


Livermore's "Numbers and Losses" gives the following calculation of killed and wounded, etc.

View attachment 540544
View attachment 540545

p. 47-48.

Numbers and Losses in the Civil War in America, 1861-1865

www.google.com

Modern statistical data on Confederate losses suggests something more like half a million.

Historian revises estimate of Civil War dead

Historian J. David Hacker’s new estimate of Civil War dead challenges long-held views about the human and psychic costs of the conflict.

discovere.binghamton.edu

How Many Died in the American Civil War? | HISTORY

The U.S. Civil War was the nation's deadliest conflict, but debate remains over the total estimate of fatalities.

www.history.com

Folks often associate civil war battlefield surgery with amputation. They didn't always amputate, but did so lots of times. Here's a hair-raising account of the effects of having one's limb lopped off and its aftermath by Private Winchell of Company D, 1st US Sharpshooters was wounded in the arm at Gaines' Mill in the summer of 1862, and captured.
His arm was amputated without anesthesia...

View attachment 540546

View attachment 540547

View attachment 540548

View attachment 540549



From Steven's history of the Berdan Sharpshooters, 1892, page 519 to read the whole gruesome tale...

Berdan's United States Sharpshooters in the Army of the Potomac, 1861-1865

www.google.com

Thank you as always friend.

 

[James Brenner]

Another aspect to consider is the soldiers' health after the war due to conditions endured during the war. Think Agent Orange in Vietnam or Burn Pits in the Gulf.

For example, ads in post-war newspapers promise cures for rheumatism, arthritis, respiratory problems, stomach ailments, etc. The reason there are so many such ads is because the war took its toll on the long-term health of the soldiers and they were an easy market for the drug dealers of the time. Cocaine, heroin, and morphine were common and made matters worse.

One other thing - and please don't take this the wrong way - the word 'affect' is a verb and 'effect' is a noun. Your English teacher would probably point that out, but at the expense of a few points.

I hope this helps a bit.

 

[Fairfield]

I don't know if this kind of story is what you are looking for.

A leading man (a state legislator) in my Maine town had 2 sons, one a bit too old to serve and the other was not yet 20; the father seems to have preferred the younger son. When recruitment was going on in this area for the 19th Maine, the father--in a fit of patriotic fervor--convinced the boy that he ought to enlist as one of the 19
. With the 19th, the son fought in many battles, including Gettysburg where the unit held back Pickett's charge; young Private Allen was twice wounded. He came home in 1864 to die of lung fever. The father was devastated; his obituary (22 years later commented on the father's never having recovered from his grief).

 

[Reconstructed Rebel]

See link below for Medical and Surgical History of the War of the Rebellion.
Not sure if this will help, but it is a great primary resource for various conditions suffered by the soldiers and how they were treated. You can search for the name of the soldier, the state, or the particular disease or condition.

The medical and surgical history of the war of the rebellion (1861-65) - Digital Collections - National Library of Medicine

collections.nlm.nih.gov

Oops - sorry @RedRover, I should have read all of the other posts first!

 

[Belfoured]

I need to do a research paler for my English class.my topic is about the physical affects of war. Does anybody have any accounts I can use regarding the wounded and killed during the war?

You may want to access Michael C.C. Adams' 2016 book Living Hell if you can. It's excellent and he has a boatload of accounts - not for anybody with a romantic view of the war.

 

[leftyhunter]

I need to do a research paler for my English class.my topic is about the physical affects of war. Does anybody have any accounts I can use regarding the wounded and killed during the war?

Thread 'Civil War PTSD' https://civilwartalk.com/threads/civil-war-ptsd.213945/
Check out this thread. PTSD wasn't recognized until WWI when it was called " shell shock" but of course PTSD has always existed from the beginning of human history. Definitely many ACW vets had PTSD but since modern psychiatry and psychology didn't exist until around the turn of the Twentieth Century we can't know how many ACW vets had PTSD but it had to be in the double digits. Unlike say Korea and Vietnam many soldiers on both sides served four years fighting both conventional and guerrilla warfare so lots of truma to go around.
Leftyhunter

 

[Bruce Vail]

Good luck! You are going to have to narrow your subject down a bit.

I've always found the subject of Civil War prosthetics to be interesting. As you probably know, Civil War army surgeons did a lot of amputations, leading directly to major advances in prosthetics in the post-war years. Just a thought....

 

[R. Porter]

There are at least two books that I know of that address issues of the effects of war concerning the Battle of Gettysburg in particular. There is the effect on the civilian population as things come together, happen and then dissipate. There is discussion of physical damage to the town and surrounding area. The establishment of hospitals for the sick and wounded. The burying of bodies, dealing with with dead horses. The creating of cemeteries. The coming of tourists, veterans and looky-loos to view the battlefield. The growth of a tourism and relic/souvenir industry. The placing of monuments. On other battlefields you might have continued death and injury due to remaining live munitions that were never found and removed after the war. The physical effects of war are not restricted to combatants, battlefields were once someone's homes and communities, and casualties are not restricted to those who fight or the time of a battle or war. And there are so many wars to choose from; ranging from unnamed conflicts of the Early Bronze Age to the present. The creation and development weapons and such concepts as forts or walls that change the landscape are part of the physical effects of war. You could write volumes on the subject. I would suggest you take the advice given above to narrow down your topic considerably if you want to turn in your paper before you're an old man. In fact, I can remember reading a paper in mathematical Biology that addressed the change in the shark population in the Mediterranean Sea during war (WW2 I think). The population change was a physical effect of war; not all physical effects of war have to do with injuries. Good luck!

 

[James Brenner]

There are some really great ideas here. I could envision you writing a paper on this topic in high school which could also wind up being your PhD dissertation in a few years.

I gather that you're interested in the material culture of the war; not just weapons, but food, clothing, and shelter as well. Perhaps you could link some aspect of that to your topic. A steady diet of coffee, hardtack, and salt pork would wreak havoc on anyone's stomach; north or south.

 

[Manassas 1861]

There are some really great ideas here. I could envision you writing a paper on this topic in high school which could also wind up being your PhD dissertation in a few years.

I gather that you're interested in the material culture of the war; not just weapons, but food, clothing, and shelter as well. Perhaps you could link some aspect of that to your topic. A steady diet of coffee, hardtack, and salt pork would wreak havoc on anyone's stomach; north or south.

Thanks for the suggestion, I've been trying to link some of those things in.

 

[Library Lady]

From the UnCivil Wars series available on Hoopla, a popular library digital service, are:

Empty Sleeves: Amputation in the Civil War South by Brian Craig Miller

Unsupported Browser

Bodies in Blue: Disability in the Civil War North by Sarah Handley Cousins

Unsupported Browser

Note: The links for the Hoopla book descriptions may look weird (something about "unsupported browser"), but they do work.

One of @R. Porter 's books may be Debris of Battle: The Wounded of Gettysburg by Gerard A. Patterson.

Civil War Medicine: Care & Comfort of the Wounded by Robert E. Denney is an excellent book. It's written in diary form and follows many patients and their doctors from many different areas.

Surgeon in Blue: Jonathan Letterman, the Civil War Doctor Who Pioneered Battlefield Care by Scott McGaugh in another excellent book. It gets into the difficulties of providing good medical care in a battlefield setting. Letterman's pioneering ideas were the basis not only for current military medical care but also for civilian emergency medical services (EMS) systems.

This may be a bit off topic for you, but This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War by Drew Gilpin Faust is an excellent book that explains how death was viewed in America in the Civil War era and how the massive number of deaths changed that view. There is an excellent PBS video based on the book available if you don't have time to read the book or just want to get the main points.

I probably wouldn't recommend Bleeding Blue and Gray: Civil War Surgery and the Evolution of American Medicine by Ira M. Rutkow for your current purposes because the emphasis is on the infighting between various styles of practicing medicine. If you are really interested in the history of medicine outside of your current paper though, it is excellent.

@USS ALASKA has done a lot of work on this thread. There may be something there you can use.

Medical papers | Medical Care

University of South Alabama JagWorks@USA Honors Theses Honors College 5-2024 © 2024 Luke Love ALL RIGHTS RESERVED Evolution of Medical Ethics During the American Civil War Luke Love ABSTRACT This thesis will explore the relationship between medical ethics and the American Civil War...

civilwartalk.com

 

[R. Porter]

There are some really great ideas here. I could envision you writing a paper on this topic in high school which could also wind up being your PhD dissertation in a few years.

I gather that you're interested in the material culture of the war; not just weapons, but food, clothing, and shelter as well. Perhaps you could link some aspect of that to your topic. A steady diet of coffee, hardtack, and salt pork would wreak havoc on anyone's stomach; north or south.

From a book, not on the Civil War, but the colonization of Australia was the observation that for one reason or another very early colonists ate a great deal of salt pork which had been brought from England. The salt crystals were sharp causing cuts and bleeding internally resulting in the excretion of blood.

 

[Rhea Cole]

If all the references cited in this thread were stacked up they would be a pyramid… I don't know exactly, but it would be big. How many pages are required for your paper? Roughly 1 / 1,000th of the pyramid.

You have neither the time nor the resources to read all that material. You have to focus on one impactful & interesting subject. The women of the United States Sanitary Commission used an ordinary domestic item to revolutionize medical care… lye soap.

Hospitals run by female nurses had a 10% lower mortality. Nobody knew why, but basic hygiene that any six year old knows today was revolutionary. That is from whence the modern nursing profession sprang.

That is a dramatic story you can't tell on ten pages or whatever.

 

[R. Porter]

If all the references cited in this thread were stacked up they would be a pyramid… I don't know exactly, but it would be big. How many pages are required for your paper? Roughly 1 / 1,000th of the pyramid.

You have neither the time nor the resources to read all that material. You have to focus on one impactful & interesting subject. The women of the United States Sanitary Commission used an ordinary domestic item to revolutionize medical care… lye soap.

Hospitals run by female nurses had a 10% lower mortality. Nobody knew why, but basic hygiene that any six year old knows today was revolutionary. That is from whence the modern nursing profession sprang.

That is a dramatic story you can't tell on ten pages or whatever.

I could see having a paragraph or two outlining what your paper is about (tell the audience what you're going to show them)

Next, a several page main body where you tell them in detail what you want them to know (show them)

Then a paragraph or two at the end summarizing what your paper was about (tell the audience what you showed them)

In the main body you might start off with a really broad introduction, something about the Civil War and the typical way a war affected some aspect of life up to that time and zero in on what particular aspect you want to address using the Civil War as an agent of change. After this you will be explaining how the Civil War in particular affected this aspect. Maybe an invention was created, maybe landscapes were changed, maybe organizations or processes were altered. You might wind down by showing this was just part of a continuous development and suggest how this affected the world afterwards or primed the environment for further change in a future war.

Yeah, I think you better hyper focus and pick something that you can describe in whatever length and reference citation constraints that are assigned to you. If your instructor wants a general paper you're gonna have to do a lightning tour through five or six examples of things that are physically affected by war. Since this is for English class I would assume that form is going to be the main criterion for your grade, so make sure you use spell-check, but also read your copy because you want to make sure your words aren't just spelled correctly but are also used in the proper context. (i.e. know to, too, and two; and your and you're etc.) Make sure your citations are correct according to whatever standard you teacher selects for you to use. If possible, have someone else proof read your paper too. It can be hard to recognize errors of logic or composition when you have been buried in a topic for a while.

I'm sure others will give you additional good advice or tell you what parts of mine to ignore. (Maybe you can get some of the folks on CWT to read and help edit your work by giving suggestions on what to add or what to subtract, etc.) Good luck!

 

[Rhea Cole]

Here you go. These are the sources I gave a great granddaughter for a paper.

The US Hospital Ship Red Rover was the first of its kind. Originally a luxury packet boat on the Mississippi River, the amenities such as a dumb waiter for delivering ice to the ward, were ideal for the Rover's new purpose.

Nursing became a woman's profession during the Civil War. The self liberated Afro American women, who were trained by nuns, were the first females ever formally enlisted in the U.S. military.

The Red Rover & her crew would be an enlightening subject for your paper.

Links:

Miscellaneous Photo Index

https://www.history.navy.mil/research/histories/ship-histories/danfs/r/red-rover.html

www.SlavesToSoldiers.org - USS Red Rover

Red Rover was a side-wheel steamer built in 1859 at Cape Girardeau, Missouri. The Confederates purchased her on November 7, 1861, and initially put her to use as a barracks ship at New Orleans, Louisiana. She was damaged by US fire during a bombardment and abandoned. The US forces captured her

www.slavestosoldiers.org

Mercy on the Mississippi: Diversity on the Red Rover Hospital Ship

Read about the conclusion of the USS Red Rover's hospital ship service as well as the diverse crew members that cared for the wounded throughout the war.

www.civilwarmed.org

https://www.history.navy.mil/content/history/nhhc/our-collections/photography/numerical-list-of-images/nhhc-series/nh-series/NH-59000/NH-59652.html

Note: For future reference the NavSource Photo Index has a list of all the commissioned USN & CSN vessels. Monitors are in the Battleship Index.