Learning from the wounded : the Civil War and the rise of American medical science
Record details
- ISBN: 9781469611556
- ISBN: 1469611554
- ISBN: 9781469611563
- ISBN: 1469611562
- ISBN: 1469615487
- ISBN: 9781469615486
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Physical Description:
print
x, 372 pages : illustrations ; 25 cm. - Edition: First edition.
- Publisher: Chapel Hill : The University of North Carolina Press, [2014]
- Copyright: ©2014
Content descriptions
Bibliography, etc. Note: | Includes bibliographical references (pages 339-360) and index. |
Formatted Contents Note: | Introduction: Medical education and the American Civil War -- Circular no. 2 and the Army Medical Museum -- The limits of morbid anatomy and the development of new medical techniques -- Civil War bodies and the development of experimental method : erysipelas and hospital gangrene during the American Civil War, 1861-1865 -- Medical specialization and specialized research -- Whose bodies? : military bodies and control during the American Civil War -- Cholera and the Civil War medical model in the postwar period -- Postwar reflections. |
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Subject: | Medical care United States History History of Medicine American Civil War History, 19th Century United States |
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Summary:
Nearly two-thirds of the Civil War's approximately 750,000 fatalities were caused by disease-- a staggering fact for which the American medical profession was profoundly unprepared. In the years before the war, training for physicians in the United States was mostly unregulated, and medical schools' access to cadavers for teaching purposes was highly restricted. Shauna Devine argues that in spite of the limitations, Union army physicians rose to the challenges of the war, undertaking methods of study and experimentation that would have a lasting influence on the scientific practice of medicine. Though the war's human toll was tragic, conducting postmortems on the dead and caring for the wounded gave physicians ample opportunity to study and develop new methods of treatment and analysis, from dissection and microscopy to new research into infectious disease processes. Examining the work of doctors who served in the Union Medical Department, Devine sheds new light on how their innovations in the midst of crisis transformed northern medical education and gave rise to the healing power of modern health science.