Gangrene and Glory: Medical Care During the American Civil War

This unusual history of the Civil War takes a close look at the battlefield doctors in whose hands rested the lives of thousands of Union and Confederate soldiers and at the makeshift medicine they were forced to employ. A medical doctor and a credentialed historian Frank R. Freemon combines poignant sometimes horrifying anecdotes of amputation infection and death with a clear-headed discussion of the state of medical knowledge the effect of the military bureaucracy on medical supplies and the members of the medical community who risked their lives their health and even their careers to provide appropriate care to the wounded. Freemon examines the impact on major campaigns - Manassas Gettysburg Vicksburg Shiloh Atlanta - of ignorance understaffing inexperience overcrowded hospitals insufficient access to ambulances and inadequate supplies of essentials such as quinine. Presenting the medical side of the war from a variety of perspectives - the Union the Confederacy doctors nurses soldiers and their families - "Gangrene and Glory" achieves a peculiar immediacy by restricting its scope to the knowledge and perceptions available to its nineteenth-century subjects. Now available for the first time in paperback this important volume takes a hard close look at a neglected and crucial aspect of this bloody conflict.