Of the 750,000 soldiers that died, approximately ⅔ of these were caused by disease;2 in example, for every 2 soldiers that died of disease, only 1 died in battle.3 This would be beneficial for the physicians who came from a variety of different backgrounds with varying degrees of education; even physicians with formal training learned from a weak curriculum.4 Surgeon Charles S. Tripler noted that medical officers were taken from “all grades… [of] civil life, and necessarily without military experience.”5 Though postmortems had been used minimally before the war, as medical students had had limited legal access to cadavers, they became a crucial practice for overwhelmed physicians, and this practice was maintained after the war. Joseph Woodward observed that the study of anatomy “and of specimens allowed some doctors to see the pathological alterations of disease for the very first time.”6 Woodward himself chose to focus on the specimens, creating a shift in focus “from gross to microscopial anatomy in the pathological field.”7 One of the most prevalent diseases throughout the Union army was cholera, and this became the focus of many physicians as the death toll from cholera rose. Using these new tactics of postmortems and microscopy of specimens, along with the study of patients in different stages of the disease, an overview of cholera was sent to other physicians, boards of health, and the…