The Civil War lasted from 1861 to 1865. It is the bloodiest battle that the United States has every fought since both sides fighting in the war were from the United States. Nearly 620,000 people were killed. The most shocking part, however, is the fact that only 150,000 people died from battle wounds.
The other 470,000 died from diseases such as malaria, dysentery, and tuberculosis (Milano).
In the 1860’s, medical procedures were very limited. Most of the time, being diagnosed with a disease like tuberculosis was akin to being handed a death sentence. These diseases spread like wildfire during the war. There are many factors that led to these diseases. Inexperienced surgeons, poor medical practices, unsterilized equipment, and the inability to get the injured off the battlefield in time were all reasons of widespread disease and death. Also, soldiers were not screened an adequate amount before being enlisted. If they could walk, use a gun, and had their front teeth, they were in.
Doctors had tried to tame these diseases with medicines of varying effectiveness. There were helpful substances such as quinine, morphine, chloroform, ether, and paregoric. These various medicines were effective at the time, and some of them are still used today. Quinine was used to treat malaria.
Morphine was a major painkiller. Chloroform was used as an anesthetic. Ether was one of the first anesthetics used in early surgery; however, now it is barely used due to its flammability and irritating side effects. Paregoric was used to treat things like diarrhea. Other medicines were harmful. There was a fever treatment that contained arsenic, which is a known poison and carcinogen. Calomel was used for diarrhea. Calomel is also known as Mercurous Chloride. Use of it caused high concentrations of mercury in the saliva. It was not known that mercury could be harmful until the 1950’s, almost 100 years after the war (Barrett).
Some diseases, at that time, did not have a cure. Examples of these diseases include typhoid, pneumonia, tuberculosis, and dysentery, with typhoid being the deadliest. Typhoid is a bacterial disease caused by contaminated food or water. It is caused by the salmonella bacteria. Vaccines for typhoid weren’t introduced until 1911, and antibiotics for it weren’t introduced until 1948. Tuberculosis is a bacterial disease that affects the lungs. It is a progressive disease that causes weight loss, exhaustion, loss of appetite, and of course, coughing. The coughing gets progressively worse, where the person eventually starts coughing up blood along with mucus. If left untreated, it will damage the lungs to the point that they become inoperable, and the infected person eventually dies. Being given a diagnosis of TB was basically being handed a death sentence in the 1800’s, since a treatment wasn’t found until the 1940’s, and a cure wasn’t found until the late 1970’s. Dysentery was another common ailment back then. It causes inflammation of the intestines and is spread through contaminated food and water (Rielly).
It’s not a surprise that these diseases spread so easily. Soldiers mostly ate beef and pork. In 1861, there was obviously no access to refrigerators, so soldiers had to preserve their food by caking it in salt. Most of the time, their food would get rancid before they ate it, which caused the rapid spread of dysentery, along with the bleak sanitary conditions.
One major cause of disease was amputations. At the time, field surgery was very crude. They did use anesthesia; however, they did not have the technology nor the time to sterilize their equipment adequately. Instead, for example, if someone had a bad wound or disease in their arm, a doctor or surgeon would just chop the arm off and call it good. More often than not, bullet wounds led to amputations.
These bullet wounds were especially deadly due to rapidly advancing ammunition and firearm technology.
The advent of new firearm technology led to many deaths in the Civil War. Before the Civil War, the most common gun used was the musket. During this war, the rifle was more commonly used. The musket and the rifle share many similarities with one major difference: the rifle utilized something called “rifling.” Rifling is the spiral-shaped grooves on the inside of the barrel that greatly improved the accuracy of the bullets. The accuracy and range of the bullet was also greatly increased by the new design of the bullet itself. The bullets used in muskets were fittingly called musket ball. They looked just like they sound. They were a ball that was loaded into the gun and fired using gunpowder. The musket ball was not very accurate and was a pain to load. Firstly, soldiers had a cartridge that contained the powder and the ball. They had to rip the cartridge open with their teeth, pour the powder into the gun, and then put the ball into the gun at the front of the barrel, called the muzzle. After all that, the musket could fire one shot, and then the the whole reloading process had to be quickly repeated.
The slow-loading speed of the musket was not its only drawback. The lack of rifling and the spherical ammunition negatively affected both accuracy and range. The new ammunition was called the minie ball. It had a conical shape and utilized the rifling of the gun. The rifling spun the bullet as it went through the barrel, and it greatly increased the stability of the bullet. Most rifles also used breech loading, while muskets used muzzle loading. Breech loaders were loaded near the back of the gun, at the chamber. The chamber is the area in which the bullet goes into the barrel. The rifle was a great technological advancement in the area of firearms. However, the rifle wasn’t the only firearm to use rifling.
The revolver was a relatively new weapon that also used rifling.. Being created around 30 years before the Civil War, it was heavily utilized. The revolver had a revolving cylinder that held six bullets. There are two main types of revolvers: single-action and double-action. The single-action revolver is fired by pulling back the hammer on the back of the gun and then pulling the trigger. A double-action revolver can be fired simply by pulling the trigger.
During the Civil War, there was a wide variety of artillery weapons. This, of course, included cannons. These cannons usually fired a round called “grapeshot,” a bundle of grape-sized projectiles, hence the name. The bullets were usually held together by a canvas bag and rope. Grapeshot was very effective at short ranges and when aimed at a large group. It was also rather effective at medium range. At long range, grapeshot was not used. Instead, a single shell was preferred. This shell could explode on impact or remain a solid mass of metal that did not combust. Either way, its effect was deadly.
Unfortunately, the advent of improved firearms greatly increased the number of deaths. On the other side of the spectrum, new medical advances saved many more lives. Sadly, the medical advances were not beneficial enough, since nearly 620,000 people died, and two-thirds of these people died from diseases. Despite medical advances of the time, this was the deadliest battle for Americans and, thankfully, the last major battle fought on American soil.
