Marrow of Tragedy: The Health Crisis of the American Civil War

Description

The Civil War was the greatest health disaster the United States has ever experienced, killing more than a million Americans and leaving many others invalided or grieving. Poorly prepared to care for wounded and sick soldiers as the war began, Union and Confederate governments scrambled to provide doctoring and nursing, supplies, and shelter for those felled by warfare or disease. During the war soldiers suffered from measles, dysentery, and pneumonia and needed both preventive and curative food and medicine. Family members—especially women—and governments mounted organized support efforts, while army doctors learned to standardize medical thought and practice. Resources in the north helped return soldiers to battle, while Confederate soldiers suffered hunger and other privations and healed more slowly, when they healed at all. In telling the stories of soldiers, families, physicians, nurses, and administrators, historian Margaret Humphreys concludes that... List of IllustrationsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction1. Understanding Civil War Medicine2. Women, War, and Medicine3. Infectious Disease in the Civil War4. Connecting Home to Hospital and Camp5. The Sanitary Commission and Its Critics6. The Union's General Hospital7. Medicine for a New Nation8. Confederate Medicine9. Mitigating the Horrors of War10. A Public Health Legacy11. Medicine in Postwar AmericaAfterwordNotesIndex