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The American Civil War was the greatest health disaster this country 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 organize medical care-to provide doctoring and nursing, supplies, and shelter for those fallen by warfare or disease. Resources in the north helped return soldiers to battle, while Confederate soldiers suffered hunger and other privations and healed less quickly, when they healed.
During the war the need for strong, healthy bodies served as the mother of medical invention. Narrating the organizational and support efforts mounted by women family members and governments, historian Margaret Humphreys concludes that medical science was not as limited at the beginning of the war as has been portrayed, but that medicine and public health clearly advanced during the war-and continued to do so after military hostilities ceased.
Our reader sees in the manuscript the "potential for changing the basic outlines of the way we think about medicine and the Civil War." Humphreys writes accessibly, even inspiredly, in describing not only medical care but the wounds, diseases, and deaths of the Civil War soldier, north and south.
About the author
Margaret Humphreys is the Josiah Charles Trent Professor in the History of Medicine, a professor of history, and an associate clinical professor of medicine at Duke University. She is the author of Malaria: Poverty, Race, and Public Health in the United States, also published by Johns Hopkins.
Summary
Medicine and public health clearly advanced during the war-and continued to do so after military hostilities ceased.
