Facinating Civil War Medical Facts

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• Many of the civilians hired to drive medical wagons to the relief of the wounded at First Bull Run got into the whiskey carried for medical purposes and were too drunk to be of any use.

• After the Battle of Gettysburg, Union surgeons worked around the clock for seven days -- performing amputations.

• An inspection of Union Army hospitals conducted between November 1862 and March 1863 reported 589 of them as good and 303 as bad or very bad.

• There were 71 Union field hospitals at Sharpsburg.

• Most young Civil War doctors had attended medical school that in those days was only a two-year study in which the second year was just a repetition of the first.

• Of the 583 Union army generals, 47, or 8 percent, were killed or mortally wounded in battle.

• Of the 425 Confederate army generals, 77, or 18 percent, were killed or mortally wounded in battle.

• Thirty-three generals from both sides died from disease or accidents.

• Measles was more prevalent and more fatal among black units than in white units.

• Chimborazo Hospital in Richmond, Virginia was the largest military hospital in the Western Hemisphere, treating 76,000 soldiers.

• Partial deafness, blindness in one eye, muscular rheumatism, or the loss of a couple of fingers were not sufficient defects to prevent a man from being inducted into a Civil War Army.

• New Orleans escaped its yearly epidemic of yellow fever in 1862 because Union General Benjamin Butler forced the citizens to clean the filthy streets.

• Of the 66 deaths that occurred at the Kittrell's Springs hospital, 48 percent were attributed to typhoid fever and pneumonia.

• After being used as a field hospital during and after the Battle of Gettysburg, the Isaac Lightner house had a stench so horrible they could not live there again.

• Phoebe Yates Pember recounted a story of a patient with a chushed ankle who fell into the care of a drunken doctor who set and bandaged the sound leg instead of the broken one, the patient died before the mistake could be corrected.

• One doctor's perscription for severe gonorrhea was silkweed root and whiskey plus pine resin and small pieces of blue vitriol.

• Stonewall Jackson did not die from his battle wound, but from pneumonia that quickly set in his lungs.

• Nationally renowned Philadelphia doctor S. Weir Mitchell promoted the wartime use of opium, "This mighty painkiller is among the best weapons in the doctor's arsenal," he wrote.

• At Chancellorsville, 5,000 Confederate soldiers reportedly could not fight because of disabling infections from their self-inflicted smallpox inoculations.

• Malaria was not usually fatal, but when 910 men of the 38th Iowa went into Mississippi for 18 months, 311 died of malaria; another 110 were incapacitated by the disease and sent home.

• Pvt. Jim Wilson survied a minie ball passing through one eye and out the back of his head. As he traveled returning to duty his thigh was broken. While his leg mended he contracted small pox. When he returned to duty he was struck by a bullet just above his heart. Wilson survived and returned to a life of farming after the war.

• One Civil War soldier suffering from severe dysentery wrote home to his family that he had answered nature's call 18 times in three hours.

• The field medical regulations instituted by Jonathan Letterman during the Civil War remained in place until World War II.

• George E. Waller, hospital steward of the 24th Virginia, was so competent and reliable that he was placed in charge of a field hospital during the winter of 1863-64.

• At the Battle of Fredricksburg, the Union had only 40 surgeons to tend to 7,000 wounded men. It took 24 hours for a wounded soldier who had been brought to a hospital to receive his first examination by a surgeon.

• Captured surgeons were usually promptly exchanged, but four Union doctors died while in Confederate prisons, probably from wounds or sickness suffered before their capture.

• The governor of Louisiana, General Francis R. T. Nicholls, lost one arm, one leg, and one eye during the war.

• At Gettysburg the Union army used 1,000 ambulances to transport 14,000 wounded Union soldiers within three days.

• The 12h Connecticut Regiment went off to war with 1,000 soldiers. By the time it reached its first battlefield, sickness had reduced its ranks to just 600 men.

• A mixture of alcohol and gunpowder was often prescribed for snakebite victims during the war.