Ch.7- Afterword

After seeing the Unions side of war healthcare it was interesting to see how similarly the Confederate healthcare system evolved. It was also shocking to learn of the ordeals the confederate states faced at the same time the Union was flourishing.  One of the things that stuck out to me was the affect that the trade embargo had on confederate healthcare.  Along with other basic goods, the primitive drugs mentioned in previous chapters (such as quinine and anesthetics) were in much shorter supply for the confederacy compared to the union.  This caused confederate physicians to have a hard time providing sufficient care to their patients resulting in less men on the battlefield.
An especially hard part to read in this section was Ch. 9's report of the prison camps.  Its horrifying to think of the wrongs each side committed in those prison camps.  The gruesome pictures published in the Narrative of Privations and Sufferings and the included claims of the much better treatment of confederate prisoners by the union are an interesting hint at propaganda, especially given the claims in some rebel prisoners memoirs that the USSC made no pictures of the confederate prisoners condition.
The book concludes with the image of a new and energized healthcare system beginning to be established in America.  The war gave experience and posed new questions to healthcare professionals, which led to innovations in future decades.

In reading Ch.4-6 of Marrow of Tragedy I was introduced to the specific ways that the USSC improved conditions in battlefield medicine, ways they were criticized for it, and how the Union improved their general hospital.  In the first chapter, It was surprising to hear such deficiencies as a lack of an ambulance service on the battlefield.  To think soldiers would be stranded for numerous days before they received care is a nasty thought.  It was interesting to learn that for the amount of work they did the sanitary commission functioned through donations rather than official government funds.  Being organized like a charity, the USSC faced problems of running a volunteer-based system and eventually had to pay their workers; however, with the significant amount of women participation, the fact that only men were paid is a testament to this era's disregard for women's' rights.  It was interesting to see how the hospital carried over to post war times and how briefly they lasted immediately after the war.  Even after all the innovations in the general hospital, the importance of home care was still highly prioritized by the postwar patient.  I look forward to learning how the hospital became the primary place of healing in America.

The beginning of Marrow of Tragedy really made it clear to me about just how inept the science of medicine was during the Civil War.  Humphreys made it clear that it was much more the organization and policy changes made in medicine than the scientific discoveries of the time that made the difference in the healthcare of the war.  It was interesting to see the impact that women had on these policy changes.  To think that the simplicity of being away from "motherly" care could make such a huge impact on health is surprising.  When I found that many of these policies and organization improvements were initiated by women I was surprised.  To think such policies could be implemented by an androcentric culture at such an unstable time is impressive. I look forward to finding more about the progression of healthcare during the Civil War.

The first day of class for Hist 424 was a syllabus day in which we discussed what we were to expect from the class and were told what we will be reading.  The first book we will read will be Marrow of Tragedy, a book about medicine and health in the civil war.  We listed things we might expect to see in the book.  These included: ways diseases spread, the knowledge of this spread at the time, and the treatments used with the current theories of the time.  We established that the germ theory of medicine had not yet developed and the "professionals" in health at the time believed in hackneyed theories such as the theory of humors or the miasma theory, the latter being more plausible as it suspected bad air to be the culprit of disease spread.  We also hit on the point that it was women in the home (precursors to the modern nurse) that were responsible for most patient health improvement through providing comfort, rest, and food to the injured.  The harsh and often harmful roles of the doctors were discussed; however, we did not discuss what experimental backing, if any, these treatments were based on.  I am curious to find out whether or not there was any viable medical research that common battlefield doctors would have been exposed to in their training, or if their treatments were just a result of ignorance.