Relief and Treatment of the Wounded in American Civil War (1865-1861)

Background and Aim: This period is referred to as medieval medicine in the United States. Surgeons and other caregivers faced large numbers of causalities and worked consecutive hours (often between 48 and 72 hours) without the opportunity to sleep.
Methods: The paper is a review article, which has been compiled, using resources published in existing literature, including in scientific databases available in cyberspace.
Results: Many casualties and deaths in the American Civil War were caused by non-combat diseases. For every three soldiers killed in battle, five more died of disease. The reported statistics of this terrible war, do not include the psychological disorders. At the time, post-traumatic stress disorders (PTSD), were not known and were not classified as war complications. Military medicine was very primitive and backward, AND intellectual skilled infrastructure of the rescuers and therapists and other experiences of military medicine, were very weak and rudimentary. For this reason, many war wounds and diseases were catastrophically and unnecessarily deadly. It was one of the bloodiest wars in American history and took place in 10,000 different locations, during which at least 2% of the American population of the time (620,000 people) were killed and countless others were mutilated. Initially, temporary field hospital centers were built near the battlefields, before the start of the war. Until 1862, ambulances were not used to transport the wounded. Towards the end of war, wounded were transported by train or ship to large urban hospitals. These hospitals were not existed before, and their construction began at 1862. By the end of war, about 400 hospitals, with 400,000 beds, had been built. Soldiers were used to transport the wounded. The number of injured in these hospitals reached two million, and the overall death rate was 8%.  3 out of 4 operations in this war, were amputations. Mortality in violent acts of amputation was 26.3%. Despite the terrible conditions of beginning and middle of the war, some important medical advances such as quinine prescribing to prevent malaria, bromine using and isolation to treat gangrene, development of ambulance, train and boat transportation system, use of antiseptics, vascular ligation technique and construction of large urban public hospitals are some of the achievements of the military medicine in this war.
Conclusion: From all the information published about the American Civil War, it appears that the process of rescuing and treating the wounded in the battlefield, due to shortage of the technical facilities and medical equipments of that time, had major shortcomings and deficiencies. However, the prevalence of various diseases and deaths after surgery of injured is considered still significantly high.