In 1870, George A. Otis, curator of the Army Medical Museum in Washington, D.C., reflected on the significant surgical advances made during the Civil War: “That the experience acquired during the war should have added largely to every subject connected with military surgery was not to be anticipated. But it may be safely asserted that, in many directions, it has advanced the boundaries of our knowledge.”
Otis, who had served as the surgeon of the 27th Massachusetts Infantry, was adamant that these “surgical lessons of the war” were “only obtained at the expense of great sacrifice.” Not only were Civil War surgeons (approximately 12,300 of whom served in the Union army) vulnerable to the dangers associated with excessive fatigue and exposure to disease, but they were also victim “to the fatalities directly incident to war.”
What follows are statistics compiled by Otis and others about the harm or death Union surgeons and assistant surgeons faced during the hostilities—numbers that, in the words of another former regimental surgeon, counter the “common error” that army surgeons were “not exposed to the dangers and chances of war.”
Illustration on Civil War surgeons casualties.
Library of Congress
Sources
The Medical and Surgical History of the War of the Rebellion, Vol. II, Part I (1870) and Part III, Vol. II (1883); Harvey E. Brown, The Medical Department of the United States Army from 1775 to 1878 (1873).
Related topics: medical care
