The Changing Role Of Nurses During The Civil War

The Civil War is remembered by its struggles. The things that men were put through in order to win. Throughout the civil war, there were many deaths from not only the fighting but sometimes the lack thereof. Sitting in the camps, soldiers were free to catch deadly diseases. These diseases could have been prevented had they had sufficient doctors and nurses. Men were constantly trying to be fit into the little room that hospitals had, and fit into the tight schedules that doctors and nurses were trying to balance. The men and women behind the battle lines were fighting a battle just as difficult as the one on the front lines.

War was everywhere at this point in time. You couldn’t go anywhere without hearing how many men had died at the last
battle. How many men had been shot by the revolutionizing gun. Guns were not the only things knocking men off their feet onto the hospital bed. Diseases were developing just as fast as any of the guns were. Typhoid fever, smallpox, measles, diarrhea, pneumonia, malaria, and tuberculosis were of the most common diseases to be caught. It was easy to catch one, if not multiple, of these diseases. Especially when imprisoned.

Any men who were captured and sent to prison accepted death. The prisons that were set up were notorious for the uncleanliness. “When the first prisoners arrived, no arrangements had been made for sewage disposal. It was intended that they should use the lower end of the stream for elimination of wastes, but orders to do so were not enforced and the prison was soon reeking with the filth of thousands of men.” reports Ovid L. Futch in his book of the History of Andersonville Prison. Prisoners were allowed to defecate anywhere they wanted. There was no place to keep the waste or any way to get rid of it. This created the perfect element for diseases to develop and fester. On top of not having anywhere to use the bathroom, the men had no way to keep a clean hygiene. They had no showers, no soap, no toothbrushes, or even hair brushes. They had absolutely nothing to keep them looking like actual human beings. “One man, who lies near our tent,...debilitated with swelled feet from exposure to the sun or dropsy, chronic diarrhea, and neglect of cleanliness, was found to have the lower part of the body near the ructum eaten into holes by maggots, which literally swarmed on him.” One man wrote in his journal that he kept with him throughout his journeys of the prisons. Men had no way to prevent these things so eventually they gave into the gross conditions of the prisons and just accepted that they were not going to get out of there a healthy man (if they got out at all). Most of the time, men from the same platoons would try to help each other out. Cleaning the men that could no longer clean themselves. This not only was done out of respect, but to try and keep the diseases from spreading. The things that the men had offered to them to eat were also causing illnesses that people had never heard of. The men in the prison camps never had enough food. They would constantly fight for more bread. They would argue and steal anyones bread who could not protect it for themselves. Many little creatures ran around the camps in these times of starvation and lack of necessities. Soon soldiers took to the idea of capturing these small animals for food. They needed something and if the animals were dumb enough to run around, then they were clever enough to catch and eat it. Rats and mice were of the animals to be captured and eaten. Rats and mice carried many diseases that they had picked up from various places. When the men not only came into contact with these animals but then proceeded to eat them, the diseases started eating the soldiers from the inside out.

The soldiers were not only in the prisons battling diseases.
Nurses were in the battlefields fighting the large numbers of men coming into the doctors tents for not only illnesses but injuries ranging from simple cuts to full body parts blown off. At the beginning of the civil war, nurses were simply women who came to the war to volunteer but after the battle of Bull run, they were organized into actual nurses who worked for the men fighting. Nurses were struggling to keep up with the patients coming in asking to be saved. Not all could be saved. There was just simply not enough room, time, medications, or hands. Exact numbers were not taken down so there is no way for us to know how many nurses were aiding the civil war. But, it is estimated that there was approximately a couple thousand nurses in total. Because the Union had more soldiers, there were more men coming in. There were also more men that were inexperienced. This led to the men constantly needing to be checked in to the hospitals. Even though there were more nurses on the Union’s side, they still would have been stressed out and struggling to keep up with the patients. On the Confederates side, they knew how to use guns, they were more experienced, and there was less of them which meant that the nurses were not constantly being flooded with more and more men unlike the Union. The Confederate side only had 4 states that had formal relief agencies. The nurses on both sides were still working as fast as they
could. If there had been more nurses participating in the civil war, more men could have had a better chance at living and going back onto the battlefield. “ ‘I have no time to write a military letter.’ complained Clara Barton to a nephew.” There was not enough women with crosses on their shoulders to save every man that came into the emergency areas.

The nurses and doctors were not given exact ways to treat these men. Most of the treatments in the civil war were so unclean and infectious that most of the surgeys in the civil war led to infections that ended up killing the man who were operated on anyways. Surgeons were not required much experience before being put into the middle of everything. A couple classes at a surgeon's school were suggested but beyond this, the 2 sides of the war were taking anyone who was willing to work with the blood. “Of the 114 surgeons in the U.S. Army in January 1861, 24 resigned to join the Confederacy and establish the Confederate Medical Service. Few were mentally or physically prepared, on either side, for what was to come.” Burns writes in his article. Surgeons had no sense of sterility. They had no understanding that they needed to be more clean. Surgeons would go from surgery to surgery using the same bloody materials. They wore the same apron that their last patient had just bled all over to try and save the next patient. The blood of the aprons continued to mix and continued to be spread into more and more dying bodies. Surgeons were often seen with knives in their mouths resulting in saliva being put into the patient's body when it was used. Understanding of what was happening did not come until much later, after thousands of men had died. With the little number of surgeons in the civil war, there was no extra men to do research. No one had the time or money to be able to figure out better techniques for the men. All of the men that were involved in the Civil War were struggling to keep up with the patients that were being rushed into the hospital, just like the nurses were. If there had been more qualified doctors and surgeons then there was, research could have been done. Lives could have been saved. The outcome of the death numbers could have been different. Nurses were struggling, doctors were rare, and diseases were raging.
The Civil War had too much of everything it didn’t need and not enough of what it did. If the Civil War had had more doctors and nurses then the death toll could have been brought down. The need for new medical techniques was so high that if there had been men and women to do research, medical advances could have been more extensive and come quicker. The Civil War desperately needed medical personnel that it did not have. On the other hand, it had diseases that it definitely did not need. The diseases had many places to advance unlike the doctors and nurses. It killed thousands of men without making a sound. If the Civil War had had less disease and more medical professionals, it could have had a more positive end. More men going home to their families and more men to tell of their horrors on the
field.