In the eighteen hundreds western medicine was very poor and many
doctors did not due anything to prevent infections, and due to this
many soldiers died. Civil war medicine practitioners did not have any
such thing as antiseptics and antibiotics were also not available. They
say that more soldiers died due to the lack of proper Civil war
medicine and also the lack of medical professionals than died from
other war wounds. At the start of the Civil war there were around one
hundred surgeons on the battlefields and this was not near enough for
the amount of casualties. One of the biggest problems with the lack of
proper Civil war medicine and doctors was when infection and disease
started there was nothing they could do to stop it since it was not
fully understood at the time.
Since much of the Civil war
medicine was so primitive one of the things doctors would do to stop
the spread of infection was amputating the infected part of the body.
This worked sometimes but other times patients would once again become
infected where the amputation took place due to the many germs that the
Civil war medicine could not properly destroy. As the war went on the
medical conditions improved a little bit but during that time period
they were still kind of in the dark ages of the medical field. Many of
the soldiers were more scared of being wounded and becoming infected or
obtaining some disease since so many soldiers were lost due to the
extremely poor medicine and doctors of the times. After the civil war
medicine started to have many advancements and soon antibiotics and
antiseptics were invented, but there were also many new and different
diseases popping up all the time. A lot of soldiers had to lose limbs
just in order to survive an infection that would be easily treated
nowadays.