Medicine- Abby O'Brien- Deborah's class

In our quilt square about medicine we have two piles of dead bodies.  Ones is smaller and one is bigger.  The smaller one represents the deaths by gunshot and the bigger pile represents deaths by sickness.  It is bigger because two to three men died of illness for everyone that died in battle.  The background is red to represent pain and death.  The ambulance is there because that is something that is used a lot now that was invented during the civil war.  The border is all medical tools that were used frequently during the time period.  The numbers around the gunshot pile are deaths in different battles, and around the disease pile are names of different sicknesses that killed many people.  At the time they did not know about germs and that is one of the reasons that it was so dirty, doctors often wouldn't wash their hands, and amputated limbs would just pile up outside the medical tents.  Many medical advances were made out of necessity during the civil war that are important today, like the Red Cross, and Ambulances.



Amputations were common during the civil war because of the extensive damage that the bullets caused and the lack of alternatives.

This is a hospital record for Francis M Barler.  He was 19 when he was admitted to the hospital (it doesn't say where).  He was married to Mary Barler and was originally from Ohio but was living in Wisconsin.  He was admitted one on March 12th 1863 for pneumonia and discharged on March 16th.  He went to the hospital again in St. Louis on April 7th 1865 for anemia, which is where there aren't enough red blood cells in your blood.  

Piles of limbs like this would often pile up outside of the hospitals.  Sometimes up to 5 feet high.  

ID tags were also invented by soldiers during the civil war.  They would write their names and hometowns on scraps of paper which they would pin to their clothes, in case they died and there wasn't someone who knew them to ID them.