Doctors During The Civil War Essay

During the Civil War in 1861, not only were there soldiers and battles, but there were also doctors. Doctors of the Civil War are less advanced than today’s. They had to deal with a lot of diseases, amputations, and finding a safe place to perform surgery. Thankfully today we have doctors and medical staff that is more sanitary, but what would the doctors have to have done during the Civil War?

How did you become a doctor back then? Most doctors had gotten training from previous ones since training was less common. Of course there still was training at schools available but it wasn’t as advanced and helpful. Most U.S. citizens, went to places like Europe, Scotland, or England to carry out their training as those countries offered a four year training instead of a two like in the U.S. U.S. schools like Harvard offered a two year or less training but with hardly any laboratory experience as Harvard at the time, did not own any stethoscopes or microscopes. Not many doctors actually graduated from medical school as most dropped out and very few graduated. Those who went back to school where usually just going to refresh knowledge by listening to a

Doctors often times became victims of the newspaper, and many people thought that doctors amputated more than actually saved lives. During the war, more than 30,000 amputations were done to try and save soldiers lives. Often times when there was a choice in what to do to save a soldier's life, an amputation was needed, but many doctors second-guessed themselves which contributed to less amputations then there could’ve been. In the year of 1864, a big break in surgery came when anesthesia came around. This allowed doctors and surgeons to operate easier but not many surgeries were actually performed. Since disease and infection usually followed surgery, it wasn’t often that surgeons choose that