Marrow of Tragedy

The Health Crisis of the American Civil War
Erscheinungsjahr 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4214-0999-3
Verlag: Johns Hopkins University Press

Buch, Englisch, 400 Seiten, Format (B × H): 158 mm x 234 mm, Gewicht: 685 g

Soldiers lay wounded or sick as both sides struggled to get them fit to return to battle.

Winner, George Rosen Prize, American Association for the History of Medicine

The Civil War was the greatest health disaster the United States has ever experienced, killing more than a million Americans and leaving many others invalided or grieving. Poorly prepared to care for wounded and sick soldiers as the war began, Union and Confederate governments scrambled to provide doctoring and nursing, supplies, and shelter for those felled by warfare or disease.

During the war soldiers suffered from measles, dysentery, and pneumonia and needed both preventive and curative food and medicine. Family members—especially women—and governments mounted organized support efforts, while army doctors learned to standardize medical thought and practice. Resources in the north helped return soldiers to battle, while Confederate soldiers suffered hunger and other privations and healed more slowly, when they healed at all.

In telling the stories of soldiers, families, physicians, nurses, and administrators, historian Margaret Humphreys concludes that medical science was not as limited at the beginning of the war as has been portrayed. Medicine and public health clearly advanced during the war—and continued to do so after military hostilities ceased.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Humphreys, Margaret

Fachgebiete

• Interdisziplinäres Wissenschaften Wissenschaften: Allgemeines Geschichte der Naturwissenschaften, Formalen Wissenschaften & Technik
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Weltgeschichte & Geschichte einzelner Länder und Gebietsräume Geschichte einzelner Länder Amerikanische Geschichte
• Medizin | Veterinärmedizin Medizin | Public Health | Pharmazie | Zahnmedizin Medizin, Gesundheitswesen Geschichte der Medizin

Inhaltsverzeichnis

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Understanding Civil War Medicine
2. Women, War, and Medicine
3. Infectious Disease in the Civil War
4. Connecting Home to Hospital and Camp
5. The Sanitary Commission and Its Critics
6. The Union's General Hospital
7. Medicine for a New Nation
8. Confederate Medicine
9. Mitigating the Horrors of War
10. A Public Health Legacy
11. Medicine in Postwar America
Afterword
Notes
Index

Über Autor(innen)

Humphreys, Margaret
Margaret Humphreys is the Josiah Charles Trent Professor in the History of Medicine, a professor of history, and an associate clinical professor of medicine at Duke University. She is the author of Malaria: Poverty, Race, and Public Health in the United States, also published by Johns Hopkins.

Margaret Humphreys is the Josiah Charles Trent Professor in the History of Medicine, a professor of history, and a professor of medicine at Duke University. She is the author of Intensely Human: The Health of the Black Soldier in the American Civil War, Malaria: Poverty, Race, and Public Health in the United States, and Yellow Fever and the South.