Disease and Hygiene/Living Conditions

These tools were used by the doctors and nurses in the civil war. They used this for amputations. They were not careful about there tools and often did not clean them after using it on a patient. There type of amputation was numbing the leg or other body part then cutting it off this was normally done when the civil war soldiers were awake and not sleeping. It could be a very painful job.
The place where the amputations and other treatments were done was in the field hospitals where the people were often sitting outside waiting to go into the tent where the doctors were. Many times people could easily die in the field hospitals because there were only 87 doctors for each armies, north and south. many were in pain out there and those who were sick were spreading there disease to many men making the doctors job twice as hard. Also the men had blankets and often shared them also spreading disease.

The field hospitals were for injured or diseased soldier. The diseases of soldiers during the civil war included, Scurvy, Diarrhea, Dysentary, Night Blindness, Meseales, Chicken Pox, Mumps, Tuberculosis, Malaria and Small Pox. Surprisingly a greater number of deaths in the military were caused by disease not fighting, 67% of deaths in the Union were from disease and 60% of Confederacy deaths were from disease. An estimated number of 186,216 people died from various diseases during the conflict of the Civil War. Main reasons for disease was worm infested bread, Un cooked meat. Soldiers would drink from streams that had human waste and dead bodies in them. Disease would spread quickly between soldiers easily because when a soldier would die their uniform would be sent to a new soldier. Their uniforms would hold disease for up to 18 months. Doctors would set up temporary field hospitals in abandoned barns and school houses to treat patients as the war moved from one place to another. In the hospitals doctors would try and vaccinate soldiers for the diseases to do this they would cut open their arm with a knife and put a little of the disease in it, a lot of times they would end up infecting the patient with the disease. They would do that using knives that had blood or dirt on them so they would also cause more disease with that. Many men died from this.

This image above is a picture of soldiers that have died on battle. These soldiers were not always healthy even though they went out to battle. Many had disease such as typhoid, measles, scurvy, small pox, and tuberculosis. A lot of the men did not know they had any disease until it was to late and they were in battle. They had no choice but to keep on fighting and that often spread the disease and made there disease so bad they died on the battle field like some of the men in this picture.
These men were very poorly fed and became so sick that they weighed just over 50 pounds. The camps were very harsh and often had trouble feeding all the men to the point where they could look like this. The men who were like this were very weak so they could barley keep them selves up. Other men could have disease where they through up so much that they lose most a lot of weight like these men could have done. They also could have a fatal disease of diarrhea where there body poops out every food that goes in them so they can not live because they can not eat.

By Nathan Edwards and Levi Dorr, Deborah's Project team