That's a good question, and (to me at least) a fascinating topic.
Your nephew sounds like one cool kid!
I'm sure you will eventually get better replies from the
real nerds on this forum, but I've poked at this topic briefly and I've noticed that it seems to be one of those topics that doesn't give you a lot of solid answers.
I have come to the conclusion that most soldiers did just go home and try to "tough it out". Recall, most men who were wounded
did heal (mostly) and got on with their lives (more or less). The ones who didn't usually tried to tough it out anyway, and then only fell by the wayside 5, 10, or 20+ years later.
There
was an increase in drinking/narcotics use (which I believe only peaked years after the war) but there's a heck of a lot of misinformation out there about it. This could be for a couple of reasons:
1. Lack of easily available info. Veterans who were dependent on drugs weren't very likely to spread that information around, and even if their use was known to their neighbors, it wasn't the sort of thing that people would record in diaries, etc. Also, as Michael W. mentioned, opiates were perfectly legal to purchase without a prescription, which doesn't leave much of a paper trail.
2. Political shock value. A whole lot of stuff was written about alcohol and drug use among veterans around the turn of the last century, and I don't know how much of it was true and how much was exaggerated, how much understated, and how much otherwise twisted to fit some author's thesis. From what I understand, the drunk/drugged-out veteran became something of a poster child for the temperance movement, as well as the movement to regulate narcotics sales.
That aside, I'm sure that most books on the subject of veterans post-war have chapters on wounded vets.
With the disclaimer that I haven't read them yet (most are in my mythical TBR pile), here are a few that look promising. I've included Amazon links, just because they provide information about the books and a preview; you should be able to find them through your local library's interlibrary loan.
The real nerds can say whether these books are actually any good or not:
--
Empty Sleeves: Amputation in the Civil War South and, from the same series,
Bodies in Blue: Disability in the Civil War North
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Sing Not War: The Lives of Union and Confederate Veterans in Gilded Age America
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Marching Home: Union Veterans and Their Unending Civil War.
For a shorter read, here are a few online articles on the topic. Not being a fully-fledged nerd (yet), I can't say much to their accuracy, but here they are:
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National Museum of Civil War Medicine : a very fun website to poke around. Lots of (searchable!) short articles on pretty much everything to do with CW medicine, including
amputees, and geared towards a newbie audience. As a bonus, each article comes with a list of sources, which you can copy/paste and search for more info. (Beware: this site is a bit of an Internet time wormhole
)
-
-Mutter Museum lesson plan: designed for middle-schoolers (I think) so it's not too gory. Covers general medical treatment for amputees, but at the end (pages 22-29 of the pdf) are two questionnaires completed by amputee veterans some years after the war. These were filled out in response to a survey conducted by Dr. S. Weir Mitchell, who was studying the phenomenon of phantom pain in amputated limbs. I wish I could find more of these surveys-- some of the responses that the old guys give are pure gold.
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Jonathan S. Jones' articles etc. He's a historian attached to Penn State, I believe, who seems to have written and studied a lot about opiate addiction among Civil War vets. The link is to a page containing a list/links to his articles, some of which are free, but the best-looking of which is behind a paywall ($12), so I haven't read it yet.
I hope some of this helps.