What Was Biggest Killer of Union and Confederate Troops During the War? (Poll)

What Was Biggest Killer of Union and Confederate Troops During the War? (Poll)

  • Pneumonia

    Votes: 10 10.6%
  • Diarrhea

    Votes: 64 68.1%
  • Malnutrition

    Votes: 1 1.1%
  • Battlefield Wounds

    Votes: 4 4.3%
  • Tuberculosis

    Votes: 1 1.1%
  • None of the Above

    Votes: 9 9.6%
  • Don't Know

    Votes: 5 5.3%

  • Total voters
    94
I had fruit farm relatives in the Gettysburg area who often passed on the story that the reason the South lost the Battle was that their solders ate so many cherries ..got dysentary and couldn't fight.
... Quite an exageration, but it did affect maybe a hundred or so, I'm told.
 
The biggest killer of Civil War soldiers was ignorance. Nobody in the world had ant idea that microscopic creatures caused disease. Lack of basic sanitation probably killed more men than all other causes put together. The vector for almost all deadly intestinal maladies is a dirty finger touching the lips.

Medical workers were ignorant, but they were not stupid or unobservant. When it became clear that mortality in hospitals with female nurses was 10 percent & more less than those with male nurses, they wanted to know why.
The simple answer was soap. Nobody knew why, but simple everyday hygiene had a dramatic impact on mortality. Female nurses such as Mother Bickerdyke revolutionized hospital sanitary practice & patient care.

Victims of intestinal diseases tend to die of a combination of maladies. For example, a soldier catches a simple cold. Lack of hygiene gives him a debilitating case of amoebic dysentery. The unhygienic conditions result in regular re-infestation with amoebas. The cold coupled with the dysentery wears the victim down to where "the old man's friend" pneumonia finishes the soldier off. He could have recovered from any one of them, but the cocktail of a cold, dysentery & pneumonia was unbeatable. On paper it is pneumonia that would be listed as the sole cause of death rather than the coupe d'gras.
 
The biggest killer of Civil War soldiers was ignorance. Nobody in the world had ant idea that microscopic creatures caused disease. Lack of basic sanitation probably killed more men than all other causes put together. The vector for almost all deadly intestinal maladies is a dirty finger touching the lips.

Medical workers were ignorant, but they were not stupid or unobservant. When it became clear that mortality in hospitals with female nurses was 10 percent & more less than those with male nurses, they wanted to know why.
The simple answer was soap. Nobody knew why, but simple everyday hygiene had a dramatic impact on mortality. Female nurses such as Mother Bickerdyke revolutionized hospital sanitary practice & patient care.

Victims of intestinal diseases tend to die of a combination of maladies. For example, a soldier catches a simple cold. Lack of hygiene gives him a debilitating case of amoebic dysentery. The unhygienic conditions result in regular re-infestation with amoebas. The cold coupled with the dysentery wears the victim down to where "the old man's friend" pneumonia finishes the soldier off. He could have recovered from any one of them, but the cocktail of a cold, dysentery & pneumonia was unbeatable. On paper it is pneumonia that would be listed as the solsource cause of death rather than the coupe d'gras.
 
The biggest killer of Civil War soldiers was ignorance. Nobody in the world had ant idea that microscopic creatures caused disease. Lack of basic sanitation probably killed more men than all other causes put together. The vector for almost all deadly intestinal maladies is a dirty finger touching the lips.

Medical workers were ignorant, but they were not stupid or unobservant. When it became clear that mortality in hospitals with female nurses was 10 percent & more less than those with male nurses, they wanted to know why.
The simple answer was soap. Nobody knew why, but simple everyday hygiene had a dramatic impact on mortality. Female nurses such as Mother Bickerdyke revolutionized hospital sanitary practice & patient care.

Victims of intestinal diseases tend to die of a combination of maladies. For example, a soldier catches a simple cold. Lack of hygiene gives him a debilitating case of amoebic dysentery. The unhygienic conditions result in regular re-infestation with amoebas. The cold coupled with the dysentery wears the victim down to where "the old man's friend" pneumonia finishes the soldier off. He could have recovered from any one of them, but the cocktail of a cold, dysentery & pneumonia was unbeatable. On paper it is pneumonia that would be listed as the sole cause of death rather than the coupe d'gras.

You bring up very good points. The civil war was perfect storm for rampant disease. Firstly, the lack of understanding that germs cause disease. Back then they were still going with the humoral theory of medicine. Disease was caused by an imbalance in the bodies humours , and restoring the humoral balance was how to treat disease. Further, you have large numbers of people who were brought into close quarters. Many of these recruits had come from rural areas and had not been exposed to disease like measles. Thus epidemics of measles and other diseases flourished. Further, the close quarters meant that respiratory diseases like pneumonia could easily spread. The importance of maintaining high levels of sanitation wasn't understood, and deadliest diseases of the war, diarrhea, dysentery and typhoid fever were all spread due to poor sanitation.

Finally, the soldiers weakened immune systems from disease and the toils of war made them vulnerable to sucumbing to a disease they might of survived or likely would have never gotten in the first place.
 
You read of a lot of typhoid deaths too. I'm not saying it was the biggest killer, it's just on the awful list.

The biggest killer of Civil War soldiers was ignorance.


I'm not saying this is wrong but the reason the Sanitary Commission was named that is relief workers took one look at conditions in camps and resolved to clean them up. The reason wasn't so much how awful camps looked as it was the connection between hygiene and disease. Guessing we'd rather not know how bad they were- you have a tough time reading descriptions encountered by relief workers. There's a good amount on the Sanitary Commission's intents when it came to hygiene and disease prevention in their annual reports.

I've always been staggered the armies didn't pay enough attention to medical care and needs, especially in the beginning. The army medical corps did their best, they were just understaffed. It's like everyone decided to hold a war and only bought one box of band aids.
 
You read of a lot of typhoid deaths too. I'm not saying it was the biggest killer, it's just on the awful list.




I'm not saying this is wrong but the reason the Sanitary Commission was named that is relief workers took one look at conditions in camps and resolved to clean them up. The reason wasn't so much how awful camps looked as it was the connection between hygiene and disease. Guessing we'd rather not know how bad they were- you have a tough time reading descriptions encountered by relief workers. There's a good amount on the Sanitary Commission's intents when it came to hygiene and disease prevention in their annual reports.

I've always been staggered the armies didn't pay enough attention to medical care and needs, especially in the beginning. The army medical corps did their best, they were just understaffed. It's like everyone decided to hold a war and only bought one box of band aids.

Both sides grossly underestimated the toils of war. Thus, both sides were left woefully unprepared.

Also when the war started it wasn’t the culture that the government has the obligation to care for wounded and dead. That philosophy only came to light during and after the war.
 
I suggest you read Mary Livermore’s depiction of Mother Mary Bickerdyke’s Civil War career. When a group of officers made a formal complaint to Sherman about Mother Bickerdyke’s efforts in support of sick & wounded soldiers he replied, “I cannot help you, she ranks me.” She rode beside Sherman at the head of the western armies during the Grand Review at the end of the war. That lady was a force of nature.

When scurvy broke out during the siege of Vicksburg, the army could not get the fresh onions, vegetables, & other sources of vitamin C needed to keep the men healthy. Grant sent Mary Livermore north to gather supplies collected by Sanitary Commission Fairs in Chicago, etc. Grant told the commander of the 14 vessel convoy that he was to regard Mrs. Livermore’s directions to have come directly from Grant, himself. Within a very short period of time, Livermore’s flotilla was sounding their whistles at landings above Vicksburg. The fresh food was distributed & the scourge of scurvy was eliminated. Sherman credited Livermore with saving the army from having to lift the siege of Vicksburg. The entire episode rates two pages of ho-hum all in a day’s work text in her memoir.
 
I would like to add two more: accidents and suicide. Men were falling off train cars, drowning in rivers, succumbing to weather, fatigue, being run over by wagons and I am sure you could cite many others.

Is suicide ever mentioned? With the emphasis today on PTSD something similar might be responsible.

In Texas just after the war a graduate of the medical school from the University of Michigan joined the 19th Ohio as an assistant surgeon. The Ohio Official Roster cites only that he died in San Antonio on Sept. 25 at the age of 24. Lacking medical supplies, quinine and even trying prairie medicinal plants he did what he could to no avail. A regiment member, Christian Lenker writes that in the Roster "his companions threw over his memory a cloak of charity, by not recording, upon the muster out roll that he died a suicide, but fifty years afterward, these true facts may be known, without disgrace to this memory." The implication is that he did this out of frustration . . . but who knows.
 
I suggest you read Mary Livermore’s depiction of Mother Mary Bickerdyke’s Civil War career. When a group of officers made a formal complaint to Sherman about Mother Bickerdyke’s efforts in support of sick & wounded soldiers he replied, “I cannot help you, she ranks me.” She rode beside Sherman at the head of the western armies during the Grand Review at the end of the war. That lady was a force of nature.

When scurvy broke out during the siege of Vicksburg, the army could not get the fresh onions, vegetables, & other sources of vitamin C needed to keep the men healthy. Grant sent Mary Livermore north to gather supplies collected by Sanitary Commission Fairs in Chicago, etc. Grant told the commander of the 14 vessel convoy that he was to regard Mrs. Livermore’s directions to have come directly from Grant, himself. Within a very short period of time, Livermore’s flotilla was sounding their whistles at landings above Vicksburg. The fresh food was distributed & the scourge of scurvy was eliminated. Sherman credited Livermore with saving the army from having to lift the siege of Vicksburg. The entire episode rates two pages of ho-hum all in a day’s work text in her memoir.
Did she record the anti-scorbotics she was able to gather?
 
I had fruit farm relatives in the Gettysburg area who often passed on the story that the reason the South lost the Battle was that their solders ate so many cherries ..got dysentary and couldn't fight.
... Quite an exageration, but it did affect maybe a hundred or so, I'm told.

This hit southern soldiers the hardest. When they went into new areas, especially going north (Kentucky, maryland, gettysburg campaigns) they would have access to foods they didn't normally have, and in large quantities. They were on a very basic diet and not much of it at times, so when they overloaded it with these other foods, their innards would freak out. You often read accounts of southern soldiers eating cherries, green apples, etc and being debilitated by them.
 
The biggest killer of Civil War soldiers was ignorance. Nobody in the world had ant idea that microscopic creatures caused disease. Lack of basic sanitation probably killed more men than all other causes put together. The vector for almost all deadly intestinal maladies is a dirty finger touching the lips.

Medical workers were ignorant, but they were not stupid or unobservant. When it became clear that mortality in hospitals with female nurses was 10 percent & more less than those with male nurses, they wanted to know why.
The simple answer was soap. Nobody knew why, but simple everyday hygiene had a dramatic impact on mortality. Female nurses such as Mother Bickerdyke revolutionized hospital sanitary practice & patient care.

Victims of intestinal diseases tend to die of a combination of maladies. For example, a soldier catches a simple cold. Lack of hygiene gives him a debilitating case of amoebic dysentery. The unhygienic conditions result in regular re-infestation with amoebas. The cold coupled with the dysentery wears the victim down to where "the old man's friend" pneumonia finishes the soldier off. He could have recovered from any one of them, but the cocktail of a cold, dysentery & pneumonia was unbeatable. On paper it is pneumonia that would be listed as the sole cause of death rather than the coupe d'gras.

Many didn't understand how to correctly lay out a camp so that the latrine area was in a proper spot away from the living/eating/medical areas, and did not run off into the drinking water or other living quarters. It wasn't far enough away, large enough, or properly drained
 
Diarrhea . Funny thing is it saved some lives on the night of April 6 1862 . The legend of soldiers at the bloody pond having angelic visitors . It was told that the wounded around that pond glowed in the moonlight . The reason for the glow in the dark soldiers was the treatment for diarrhea in 1862 was made primarily with Mercury . It was later changed but that is one instance of diarrhea possibly saving lives .
 
I suggest you read Mary Livermore’s depiction of Mother Mary Bickerdyke’s Civil War career. When a group of officers made a formal complaint to Sherman about Mother Bickerdyke’s efforts in support of sick & wounded soldiers he replied, “I cannot help you, she ranks me.” She rode beside Sherman at the head of the western armies during the Grand Review at the end of the war. That lady was a force of nature.

When scurvy broke out during the siege of Vicksburg, the army could not get the fresh onions, vegetables, & other sources of vitamin C needed to keep the men healthy. Grant sent Mary Livermore north to gather supplies collected by Sanitary Commission Fairs in Chicago, etc. Grant told the commander of the 14 vessel convoy that he was to regard Mrs. Livermore’s directions to have come directly from Grant, himself. Within a very short period of time, Livermore’s flotilla was sounding their whistles at landings above Vicksburg. The fresh food was distributed & the scourge of scurvy was eliminated. Sherman credited Livermore with saving the army from having to lift the siege of Vicksburg. The entire episode rates two pages of ho-hum all in a day’s work text in her memoir.
That was probably due to Grant, who knew by experience that when the army began to buy local food in Mexico, people seemed to be healthier. Also Hooker had been working on the same issues some of Hookers quartermasters had probably written reports on these issues. When moving, an army could forage on the land. The problem was acute when an army became stationary.
 
What Was Biggest Killer of Union and Confederate Troops During the War?
We have to keep in mind that modern germ theory was still years away.
We also have to keep in mind that even in the 21st Century when people from all over the country get together they get sick.
For example my son who was a drill instructor at Paris Island notes that when young healthy people from all over the country come together every one gets sick. Keep in mind that's with daily cleaning of the barracks and modern medicine.
Circa Civil War there is nothing approaching the same level of sanitation.
There is no such thing as bottled water or protecting water sources.
At the World Series of Poker Championship in Las Vegas held at the Rio Hotel where thousands of people gather from all over the world there is always " the Rio Flu".
Even with much better sanitation it is belived by some medical historians that " the Spanish Flu" actually started at Ft.Riley Kansas.
There is no way to stop infections but bad sanitation and poor understanding of disease makes it worse.
Leftyhunter
 
Not a medical person but from all that I have read, intestinal diseases such as dysentery and diarrhea were killers feared by all. Dehydration was the result of these stomach disorders and they killed more than battle wounds*
Regards
David

*Civil War Medicine: An Overview of Medicine
 
I had fruit farm relatives in the Gettysburg area who often passed on the story that the reason the South lost the Battle was that their solders ate so many cherries ..got dysentary and couldn't fight.
... Quite an exageration, but it did affect maybe a hundred or so, I'm told.
I have read that AP Hill’s men had eaten Green Apples that them great difficulty as they marched from Cashtown to Gettysburg. I can not remember the source.
 
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