Gangrene and Glory: Medical Care during the American Civil War - Softcover

Freemon, Frank R.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0252070100 ISBN 13: 9780252070105

Publisher: University of Illinois Press, 2001

Synopsis

This unusual history of the Civil War takes a close look at the battlefield doctors in whose hands rested the lives of thousands of Union and Confederate soldiers and at the makeshift medicine they were forced to employ.
 
A medical doctor and a credentialed historian, Frank R. Freemon combines poignant, sometimes horrifying anecdotes of amputation, infection, and death with a clearheaded discussion of the state of medical knowledge, the effect of the military bureaucracy on medical supplies, and the members of the medical community who risked their lives, their health, and even their careers to provide appropriate care to the wounded. Freemon examines the impact on major campaigns--Manassas, Gettysburg, Vicksburg, Shiloh, Atlanta--of ignorance, understaffing, inexperience, overcrowded hospitals, insufficient access to ambulances, and inadequate supplies of essentials such as quinine.
 
Presenting the medical side of the war from a variety of perspectives--the Union, the Confederacy, doctors, nurses, soldiers, and their families--Gangrene and Glory achieves a peculiar immediacy by restricting its scope to the knowledge and perceptions available to its nineteenth-century subjects. Now available for the first time in paperback, this important volume takes a hard, close look at a neglected and crucial aspect of this bloody conflict.
 

About this title

About the Author

Frank R. Freemon, a practicing physician, holds a doctorate in history and is a veteran of the U.S. Navy. He is the author of Microbes and Minié Balls, an annotated bibliography of Civil War medicine.
 

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Publication date: 2001
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0252070100
• ISBN 13: 9780252070105
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 256