Surgery on the U.S.

My topic is surgery during the Civil War. Before I created my piece, I had no idea what I was going to do. As I was thinking, my mom said something really smart. She said something like: “Well, I’ve been hesitant to say this because it seems so obvious, but how the soldiers were being stitched up seems a lot like how the nation was being fixed as well.” I loved it. So I got to work. First I created the top left piece. It represents the similarity between what was happening to the individual soldiers and what was happening to the nation as a whole by displaying the United States cut in half, with an open wound between the North and the South. The bottom right image represents how, in time, many of the soldiers, along with the United States, grew back together. The symbol in the top right represents medicine. The surgical kit on the bottom left displays the kind of tools that the surgeons used during the civil war, one of which is called a “Sawbone”. A common mistake people make is that there was no anesthesia back then, but that is not true. The surgeons also began to realize that sanitation was important, but they could not always be sanitary because somebody might die in the time it took to sterilize their tools. The medicine and surgical techniques during the Civil War have led to great discoveries that have influenced medicinal practices today.

Top, left- A surgical kit used during the Civil War

Top, Right- A man being operated on

Middle, Left- a medical symbol

Middle, Right- An amputation kit

Bottom- A place where many soldiers were healed.

Facts:

• Chloroform is what they used for an anesthetic. The chloroform was applied to a cloth and then held over the injured man's mouth and nose until he was unconsious. They then preformed the surgery.
• It is emstimated that 75% of men that had a limb amputated did recovor.
• Infection killed twice as many men as actual bullets and fighting did.
• Many Civil War surgeons learned how to amputate from a book by Samuel Cooper called "The practice of surgery"
• A soldier had an estimated one in four chance of not surviving the war.
• An average Surgeon had trained for two years or less, with no clinical experience.
• When the war began, the federal army had only 98 doctors, while the Union had only 24. By 1865, the numbers of Surgeons grew into the thousands.
• About 175,000 men got injured in the Civil War, and 30,000 of those injuries led to amputation.

Thank you,

Kate Shober.

Frank's design team.