Medical papers

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 through a microhistorical approach. This includes analyzing the ways in which the physician-patient relationship was conducted and which medical practices were deemed ethical and by whom. Changes that occurred in medical ethics during the war will be analyzed and explained.


Because of copyright, please use above link.

Cheers,
USS ALASKA
 
University of Mississippi
eGrove
Honors Theses
Honors College (Sally McDonnell Barksdale Honors College)
2005

Civil War Medicine: Crisis and Heroism in the Medical Profession, 1861 - 1865
Diana Frances Semmes

This Undergraduate Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Honors College (Sally McDonnell Barksdale Honors College) at eGrove. It has been accepted for inclusion in Honors Theses by an authorized administrator of eGrove. For more information, please contact [email protected]. ©2005 Diana Frances Semmes ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

ABSTRACT
This thesis uses a variety of sources to look at the medical profession during the Civil War era. Both primary sources and secondary sources provide information on the perspectives of the key players during the period as well as an understanding of the knowledge present at that time and the methods and practices employed. Most of the research has been done using the J. D. Williams Library on the University of Mississippi main campus though it has been supplemented by books in my own personal collection, items loaned from Dr. Neff's collection, online resources such as the Library of Congress and the Centers for Disease Control website, and information in the Archives of the State of Mississippi. Information gathered includes personal experiences from Civil War medicine recorded, as well as information regarding the history of medicine. Also included is information regarding the techniques and equipment used by the medical professionals. The picture painted by all of the information gathered is a scene of crisis because of the overwhelming numbers of soldiers needing treatments for battlefield wounds and diseases. Diseases ravished the army camps. Horrifying descriptions of amputations depict the state of surgery at a time when antisepsis was only beginning to be employed and when there were very limited drugs to help alleviate suffering and infections. However, through the crisis came a form of heroism among the doctors and other medical professionals in their ability to treat as many people as possible with the knowledge they had. Through the crisis and heroism, came advancements in medicine that led to the medical revolution to come in the decades following the war. This study of medicine concludes that medical practice during the Civil War period is an important aspect of the time and plays a key role in future developments in the world of medicine.


Because of copyright, please use above link.

Cheers,
USS ALASKA
 
The University of Southern Mississippi
The Aquila Digital Community
Master's Theses
Summer 8-2021

"My Bruises Are Inward:" A Study of Mental Trauma in the American Civil War
Cody Turnbaugh

This Masters Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by The Aquila Digital Community. It has been accepted for inclusion in Master's Theses by an authorized administrator of The Aquila Digital Community. For more information, please contact [email protected]. COPYRIGHT BY Cody Turnbaugh 2021

ABSTRACT
War is traumatic. Since the American Psychiatric Association first recognized post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in 1980, living veterans of combat have been diagnosed at an alarmingly high rate. However, mental trauma related diagnoses have existed for centuries, including several that were identified around the time of the American Civil War. This thesis argues that Civil War soldiers experienced mental trauma related to their military service. It does so through three lenses. Focused on the mental trauma among
Northern veterans, this study investigates in particular the relationship between mental trauma and socioeconomic status. It analyzes the experiences of both white and African American soldiers with mental trauma resulting from combat, and it examines the public's perception of veterans and their mental trauma accrued during the war. This work is grounded in a rich secondary literature and contemporary personal correspondence, diaries, newspapers, periodicals, military pensions, asylum records, and medical documents. These primary sources offer an intimate examination of the struggles of Civil War soldiers to overcome the psychological impact of war. An in-depth study of the emotional suffering of Civil War combatants results in a better understanding of mental trauma as it relates to military history.


Because of copyright, please use above link.

Cheers,
USS ALASKA
 
West Virginia University
The Research Repository @ WVU
Graduate Theses, Dissertations
Eberly College of Arts and Sciences
Doctor of Philosophy History
2017

War on the Mind: Trauma and Coping among Union Soldiers and Veterans
Kathleen Anneliese Logothetis Thompson

This Dissertation is protected by copyright and/or related rights. It has been brought to you by the The Research Repository @ WVU with permission from the rights-holder(s). You are free to use this Dissertation in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you must obtain permission from the rights-holder(s) directly, unless additional rights are indicated by a Creative Commons license in the record and/ or on the work itself. This Dissertation has been accepted for inclusion in WVU Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports collection by an authorized administrator of The Research Repository @ WVU. For more information, please contact [email protected].

ABSTRACT
"War on the Mind: Trauma and Coping in the Union Army," is a work of social, cultural, and military history and examines experiences of mental trauma in the Union Army during the war and among veterans in the post-war period. Without our modern definition of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Civil War soldiers had a very different view of how they were mentally experiencing the war. By looking at soldier accounts and the records of insane asylums it is clear that soldiers did have experiences of trauma and insanity during or related to their wartime service. However, those same asylum records, as well as medical and military policies and pension records, reveal that nineteenth-century Americans—doctors, military personnel, and the soldiers themselves—interpreted insanity as produced by physical or moral causes, not by the horrible experiences of warfare. My research analyzes official forms of treatment and diagnosis in the military and medical fields during the war as well as strategies of coping developed by the soldiers themselves. In the post-war period, the medical and social perceptions of insanity did not change drastically. Instead, society and the government distributed aid and support based on the same foundation of physical and moral causation as during the war. As a result of these continued perceptions of insanity, veterans' organizations and commemorations served as a coping mechanism in addition to the political and social purposes already studied by historians. At the same time that veterans' organizations, such as the Grand Army of the Republic, acted to commemorate their participation in the war and push for veterans' benefits in the post-war period, these groups also provided veterans support systems that helped those struggling to survive and those struggling with their wartime experiences. By looking at both the wartime and post-war periods, this research demonstrates that the Civil War, which sparked great transformations in many areas, did not significantly change the study and care of the insane. Instead, the prevailing culture of nineteenth-century America—including notions of masculinity, standards of social behavior, and beliefs about society's relationship with the government—
hindered the acceptance of the idea that the horrific experience of war might itself affect soldiers.


Because of copyright, please use above link.

Cheers,
USS ALASKA
 
Journal Article
Pharmaceutical Conditions and Drug Supply in the Confederacy
Norman H. Franke
The Georgia Historical Quarterly
Vol. 37, No. 4 (December, 1953), pp. 287-294, 296-298
Georgia Historical Society

1733421584199.png



Full article at above link on JSTOR with Google sign-in (In the upper right-hand corner of the linked page, there is a 'Log in' button. If you have a Gmail account, you have a Google sign-in and this will allow for free reading of 100 articles a month).

Cheers,
USS ALASKA
 
Journal Article
Down to Vicksburg: The Nurses' Experience
Kathleen S. Hanson
Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society (1998, Vol. 97, No. 4 (Winter, 2004/2005), pp. 286-309
University of Illinois Press

Yet, among all this historical coverage, there is a group whose voices have not been heard, whose perspectives on the campaign have not been illuminated, and whose experiences have not been widely shared. Nurses participated in the Vicksburg campaign, providing care for the wounded and the sick. The length of the campaign gave the female nurses an opportunity to make observations on the care that was planned or not planned; they observed the outcomes of the campaign, both in military strategy and in the cost of human lives, and lived among the soldiers of the Union army. This article draws on the experiences of two Illinois women, Louisa Maertz and Sarah Gallop Gregg, as well as Emily Parsons, an eastern woman assigned to the hospitals of the western theater of war.


Full article at above link on JSTOR with Google sign-in (In the upper right-hand corner of the linked page, there is a 'Log in' button. If you have a Gmail account, you have a Google sign-in and this will allow for free reading of 100 articles a month).

Cheers,
USS ALASKA
 
I'm referencing post #23 - My bruises hurt inward

On page 40, Wilbur Fisk is describing the ghastly sights he is seeing of the unburied bodies at Gettysburg, several days later. I've been trying to cut-and-paste but somehow it won't let me. Anyway, he goes on about how it deeply affects him and he doesn't want to advance his curiousity any further and hopes to never see such sights again.

Someone else mentions how "they are glad no women are around" because this is basically mansplaining that they wouldn't be able to handle it. And he basically says that with something like, "they would be upset to see someone hurt."

Yet…. No one ever gives a thought or writes a paper on the possible PTSD that the nuns, ordinary women (North or South) or Elizabeth Thorn who buried a whole bunch of dead at Evergreen Cemetery - days later and while pregnant - not at their best, had while nursing or burying the dead. She had a whole confederation of quitters - that were men - that quit on her. They couldn't handle it.

I'm very glad you put this paper in but I think it is incomplete.
 
USS ALASKA said:
Southern Adventist University
KnowledgeExchange@Southern
Senior Theses
History and Political Studies Department
2016

The American Medical Association and the Civil War: Influences, Improvements, and Outcomes
Peter Houmann
Southern Adventist University

This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the History and Political Studies Department at KnowledgeExchange@Southern. It has been accepted for inclusion in Senior Theses by an authorized administrator of KnowledgeExchange@Southern. For more information, please contact [email protected].

ABSTRACT
View attachment 490949


Cheers,
USS ALASKA
Click to expand...
Good one, @Alaska! The book, "Doctors in Gray" about the Confederate medical service is a good read - informative. Before reading it, I had no idea how much thought and effort was put into the Confederate medical service and its hospitals.
 
Journal Article
The Inhospitable Hospital: Gender and Professionalism in Civil War Medicine
Jane E. Schultz
Signs
Vol. 17, No. 2 (Winter, 1992), pp. 363-392
The University of Chicago Press

1740159393388.png



Full article at above link on JSTOR with Google sign-in (In the upper right-hand corner of the linked page, there is a 'Log in' button. If you have a Gmail account, you have a Google sign-in and this will allow for free reading of 100 articles a month).

Cheers,
USS ALASKA
 
USS ALASKA said:
Journal Article
The Inhospitable Hospital: Gender and Professionalism in Civil War Medicine
Jane E. Schultz
Signs
Vol. 17, No. 2 (Winter, 1992), pp. 363-392
The University of Chicago Press

View attachment 539922


Full article at above link on JSTOR with Google sign-in (In the upper right-hand corner of the linked page, there is a 'Log in' button. If you have a Gmail account, you have a Google sign-in and this will allow for free reading of 100 articles a month).

Cheers,
USS ALASKA
Click to expand...
The women who worked in the hospitals deserve admiration beyond words! I can hardly imagine the determination and effort required to go to work day after day in the hospitals of the Civil War, encountering the serious illnesses, wounds, and stench and horror that was abundant.
 
Catholic Sister-Nurses in the U.S. Civil War
Sr. Catherine Thomas Brennan, O.P.
HIST 560--History of the U.S. Civil War and Reconstruction
November 30, 2018

In 1924, the Monument to the Catholic Sisters who nursed during the Civil War was dedicated in Washington, D.C. A bronze bas relief titled "Nuns of the Battlefield" depicts the Sisters in the distinctive habits of their twelve religious Orders below the inscription "THEY COMFORTED THE DYING - NURSED THE WOUNDED-CARRIED HOPE TO THE IMPRISONED - GAVE IN HIS NAME A DRINK OF WATER TO THE THIRSTY." All told, during the Civil War, over 600 Catholic Sisters representing 12 religious orders and 21 religious communities nursed the sick and wounded on both sides of the bloody conflict. They are a significant portion of the twenty thousand women relief workers who labored for millions of hours for the sick and wounded, both Blue and Grey. The Catholic popular imagination and scholarly press tends to remember the Sisters' wartime service as a heroic work which presented the charitable and patriotic face of the Church amid virulent anti-Catholic and anti-Irish prejudice in America, since the majority of these Sisters were Irish Catholics.

https://openlightmedia.com/wp-conte...holic-Sister-Nurses-in-the-U.S.-Civil-War.pdf

Cheers,
USS ALASKA
 

Attachments

Was Civil War Surgery Effective?
Matthew J. Baker
December 29, 2016

Abstract
During the U. S. Civil War (1861-65) surgeons performed a vast number of surgical procedures. The efficacy of surgery has been continually debated since the war began, in part because of lack of evidence for the (in)effectiveness of surgery. I analyze data gathered by Dr. Edmund Andrews, a surgeon with the 1st Illinois Light Artillery. The data can be arranged as observational data on surgery and recovery, with controls for wound location and severity, and with instruments for surgery. Analysis of the data using bivariate probit and a switching regression suggests that surgery was effective, was applied selectively by surgeons, and increased the probability of survival with an average treatment effect of 0.06-0.25 points. Results also suggest that surgeons applied surgery selectively and in situations in which it was likely to be beneficial; among those receiving surgery, I find an average treatment effect of 0.25-0.28 points.

I am faithful, I do not give out,
The fractur'd thigh, the knee, the wound in the abdomen,
These and more I dress with impassive hand (yet deep in my breast
a fire, a burning flame)
Walt Whitman, The Wound Dresser


Please use above link.

Cheers,
USS ALASKA
 
Holy Moly 6,602 pages...

The National Library of Medicine
NLM Digital Collections
The medical and surgical history of the war of the rebellion (1861-65)
NLM Publications and Productions
United States. Surgeon-General's Office.
Barnes, Joseph K., 1817-1883
Woodward, Joseph Janvier, 1833-1884
Smart, Charles, 1841-1905
Otis, George A. (George Alexander), 1830-1881
Huntington, D. L. (David Lowe), 1834-1899
Copyright: The National Library of Medicine believes this item to be in the public domain (More information)

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

collections.nlm.nih.gov collections.nlm.nih.gov

Links to all 6 volumes on right-hand side of page in above link or listed below.







Happy reading!
USS ALASKA
 
USS ALASKA said:
Holy Moly 6,602 pages...

The National Library of Medicine
NLM Digital Collections
The medical and surgical history of the war of the rebellion (1861-65)
NLM Publications and Productions
United States. Surgeon-General's Office.
Barnes, Joseph K., 1817-1883
Woodward, Joseph Janvier, 1833-1884
Smart, Charles, 1841-1905
Otis, George A. (George Alexander), 1830-1881
Huntington, D. L. (David Lowe), 1834-1899
Copyright: The National Library of Medicine believes this item to be in the public domain (More information)

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

collections.nlm.nih.gov collections.nlm.nih.gov

Links to all 6 volumes on right-hand side of page in above link or listed below.







Happy reading!
USS ALASKA
Click to expand...
This is seriously cool because it has case notes. If I remember correctly, the initial treatment of Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain's Cold Harbor wound is in here.
 
Journal Article
"A Big Job"
Christopher Thrasher
Louisiana History: The Journal of the Louisiana Historical Association
Vol. 65, No. 2 (Spring 2024), pp. 195-236
Louisiana Historical Association

1748889882276.png



Full article at above link on JSTOR with Google sign-in (In the upper right-hand corner of the linked page, there is a 'Log in' button. If you have a Gmail account, you have a Google sign-in and this will allow for free reading of 100 articles a month).

Cheers,
USS ALASKA
 
TCNJ JOURNAL OF STUDENT SCHOLARSHIP
VOLUME IX
APRIL, 2007
MEDICINE AND ITS PRACTICE DURING THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR
Jessica Paciorek
Department of History

ABSTRACT
Although popular belief holds that the American Civil War occurred during the "medical middle ages," this was not true. Over the course of the war, many pioneering physicians, scientists, and civilians contributed to the development of medicine into a modern discipline. Improvements were made to hospitals, including the creation of an efficient ambulance and transportation service. Women volunteers made important discoveries in the areas of sanitation and nutrition, while they cemented a place in medicine for female nurses. The practice of surgery was expanded to include new techniques, while standard practices, such as amputation, were improved. Rising survival rates for surgery in both military and civilian spheres enhanced public confidence in medical practices, which further encouraged doctors to attempt new procedures. Finally, the field of pharmacology was born out of the enormous demand for medicines during the war. While many of the remedies were initially homegrown from natural sources, wartime demands for medicines led to the development and growth of the pharmaceutical industry, and the beginnings of several of today's largest pharmaceutical companies. The efforts of many scientists, physicians, and civilian volunteers during the Civil War not only improved the quality of medical care available to American soldiers, but also spurred improvements in civilian medicine and paved the way for America to take its place in the modern world as a leader in science and healthcare.

The expression of American personality through this war, is not to be looked for in the great campaigns, and the battle fights. It is to be looked for just as much, (and in some respects more,) in the hospitals, among the wounded. -- Walt Whitman


Please use above link.

Cheers,
USS ALASKA
 
Appalachian State University
Boone, North Carolina

When One Goes Nursing, All Things Must Be Expected
Camille Reese and Phoebe Pollitt

Abstract
The names and accomplishment of Ella King Newsome, Phoebe Yates Pember, and Kate Cummings are familiar to students of Confederate and Civil War nursing history. Newsome, Pember, and Yates were great nursing leaders, organizing and managing large hospitals or traveling with the troops from battlefield to battlefield. As important and interesting as each of these nurses are, their work is not representative of the work of the approximately 1,000 women who nursed for the Confederacy during the War Between the States. The majority of nurses during the Civil War worked in their own communities, slowly helping sick and wounded men toward healing or death.


Please use above link.

Cheers,
USS ALASKA
 
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