EMS History
American Civil War
American Civil War, a military conflict between the United States of
America (the Union) and the Confederate States of America
(the Confederacy) from 1861 to 1865. It began on April 12, 1861,
when Confederate forces opened fire on Fort Sumter in Charleston
Harbor, South Carolina, and lasted until May 26, 1865, when the last
Confederate army surrendered. The chief cause of the war was
slavery. Southern states depended on slavery to support their
agricultural aconomy. Only a small proportion of Northerners
actively opposed slavery. However, they were opposed to its
expansion, in part because they did not want to compete against slave
labor. The main debate centered on whether slavery should be
permitted in the Western territories recently acquired during the
Mexican War (1846-1848).
Disease killed far more men in both armies than did bullets. Medical
knowledge was so inadequate that the sick or wounded soldier sent to
a hospital was as likely to find it a step to the grave as a way to recovery.
The treatment of prisoners of war has been the subject of heated
argument. The death rate among Union and Confederate prisoners was
appalling. Prison conditions, rather than willful mistreatment, caused
most deaths.
The war took more than 600,000 lives,
destroyed property valued at $5 billion, brought freedom to 4 million
black slaves, and opened wounds that have not completely healed
more than 125 years later.
USA Army EMS at the Civil War
USA Army EMS at the Civil War Medicine was not
ready for the Civil War.
Disease ravaged both sides.
Improved weapons increased wound severity. Going to a hospital
often meant death. There were attempts to reform the hospital system and improve hospital design.
But good intentions were frustrated by a lack of information on
hygiene and sanitation. Bacteriology was an infant European science.
Louis Pasteur published his first paper in 1861, the year the Civil
War began. George Sternberg, who later would lead the U.S. into the
age of bacteriology and serve as Army surgeon general, was still just
a young battlefield doctor. Yet there was progress, especially in
evacuation of casualties. In early 1862 Congress expanded and
reorganized the AMEDD, giving the Army Surgeon General actual
general-officer rank for the first time. That same year the AMEDD
directed the keeping of detailed medical records, later compiled into a
massive five-volume medical history of the Civil War -- the first
detailed history of war's medical effects. Jonathan Letterman, medical
director of the Army of the Potomac, led epochal reforms:
reorganized medical field supply, a system of forward hospitals, and
an AMEDD-controlled ambulance corps. His field-hospital and
ambulance evacuation ideas are followed in essence even today. In
May 1862, Surgeon General Dr. William Hammond founded the Army
Medical Museum in Washington, the second great AMEDD institution.
Housed in six places over the years, including Ford's theater (where
Lincoln had been shot), the museum was the base for Army medical
research. In 1949 it became today's all-service Armed Forces Institute
of Pathology. From 1864-1867, AMEDD officers working at the
museum invented methods for taking photographs of bacteria through
microscopes.
Paramedic Neomi Zvi - Feb 2000