Civil War Medicine
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Procedures:
If teachers or students are unfamiliar with the Valley, click here to learn more about this amazing digital archive. Introduce the lesson by showing the class this image of medicine in the Civil War. Based on this image, let students make predictions about what they will learn in this lesson that explores medicine and hospitals in the Civil War. Write these predictions on the board to re-visit at the conclusion of the study.
After students are in the framework of mid-nineteenth century medicine, introduce the chart that they should complete after they have read several newspaper articles about Civil War Medicine. Students should read:
Next, students should go to the 1890 U.S. Special Veterans Census Augusta County, Virginia. If students are unfamiliar with censuses or the term veteran, introduce those concepts. Have students find 2 soldiers who have suffered a gunshot wound or are afflicted with one of the diseases they learned about above. Have students fill in this quick chart to organize their findings.
The soldiers' dossiers are another good source of information. Have students do a search in both Augusta and Franklin County to find out how many soldiers died of wounds and died of diseases in each county. The casualty search is the last choice on the soldiers dossiers page. Have students fill out the next section of their chart based on their findings. A note to teachers: the numbers indicate that more soldiers died of disease than from wounds during the war. This is generally accepted by historians, but it should be emphasized that this small search does not constitute a historical truth. This is a small sampling, and these dossiers were not always consistently completed. However, these numbers do reinforce generally accepted historical wisdom.
Students will now examine a fourth source of information on Civil War medicine - soldiers' letters. Have students do searches on words they think are good indicators that the letter refers to health issues. If students are struggling, Samuel Potter's letters are an easy starting point. Using his descriptions, students ought to be able to brainstorm a list. It might be a neat exercise after the students read through the letters to see words that soldiers use in the 19th century that indicate sickness that we would not normally use.
As students read through these letters, they should complete a Venn diagram that illustrates the similarities and differences of Northern (Franklin County) and Southern (Augusta County) soldiers' experiences of health issues during the war. It can be as specific as what types of treatment soldiers received to what soldiers feared about being sick and what they complained about most.
Once students have completed all three activities, lead a discussion that draws on what they've learned to paint a more general impression of Civil War medicine based on primary documents from two counties. As a starting point, ask students to share the most interesting part of a letter they read. Ask students whether they discovered more simlarities or differences. Return to students' predictions about Civil War medicine and rewrite the statements that are incorrect so that they reflect the information they learned from this exercise. For statements that were not addressed by the exercise, assign students to research thos ideas for homework.
