Learning from the Wounded: The Civil War and the Rise of American Medical Science

by Shauna Devine

Overview

Nearly two-thirds of the Civil War's approximately 750,000 fatalities were caused by disease--a staggering fact for which the American medical profession was profoundly unprepared. In the years before the war, training for physicians in the United States was mostly unregulated, and medical schools' access to cadavers for teaching purposes was highly restricted. Shauna Devine argues that in spite of these limitations, Union army physicians rose to the challenges of the war, undertaking methods of study and experimentation that would have a lasting influence on the scientific practice of medicine.

Though the war's human toll was tragic, conducting postmortems on the dead and caring for the wounded gave physicians ample opportunity to study and develop new methods of treatment and analysis, from dissection and microscopy to new research into infectious disease processes. Examining the work of doctors who served in the Union Medical Department, Devine sheds new light on how their innovations in the midst of crisis transformed northern medical education and gave rise to the healing power of modern health science.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781469611563
Publisher:	The University of North Carolina Press
Publication date:	03/17/2014
Series:	Civil War America
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	384
File size:	5 MB

About the Author

Shauna Devine is visiting research fellow in the department of the history of medicine at the Schulich School of Medicine and Dentistry, Western University.

Table of Contents

Nearly two-thirds of the Civil War's approximately 750,000 fatalities were caused by disease--a staggering fact for which the American medical profession was profoundly unprepared. In the years before the war, training for physicians in the United States was mostly unregulated, and medical schools' access to cadavers for teaching purposes was highly restricted. Shauna Devine argues that in spite of these limitations, Union army physicians rose to the challenges of the war, undertaking methods of study and experimentation that would have a lasting influence on the scientific practice of medicine.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

An important contribution to the history of medicine in the United States. Devine does a remarkable job of showing how wartime experience catalyzed and reconfigured the evolution of American medicine along scientific lines, stimulating vastly increased attention to pathological investigation, experimentation, specialization, and probing of the nature of disease. She argues convincingly that the war gave American physicians enormous opportunities to do work on native ground that only small numbers of them had previously been able to observe in European centers.—Michael Bliss, author of William Osler: A Life in Medicine and Harvey Cushing: A Life in Surgery



Transforming three generations of scholarship, this book changes the story of the development of the American medical profession. Rather than depending on the magisterial but opinionated Medical & Surgical History of the War of the Rebellion, Shauna Devine returns to the manuscript reports of the period and asks the simple question, What did the doctor do during the Civil War? She finds over ten thousand doctors dissecting—because they were ordered to, because the bodies were available during the war, and because the Army taught them how. Others went beyond anatomic pathology to do physiologic and clinical experiments. They all went home to shape an American medical science, preparing the social, political and scientific ground for the next generation of European apostles. This is the most exciting book in nineteenth-century American medical history in the last fifteen years.—Dale C. Smith, Ph.D., Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences



Learning from the Wounded is more than a path-breaking study of how the American Civil War transformed American medicine and medical research. It opens a wide window onto the individual and institutional players who shaped this transformation, giving the overall story the sustained and in-depth attention it has long deserved as part of, and not apart from, the broader history of the Civil War. With this artful and engrossing achievement, Shauna Devine makes an important contribution to the field that deserves to be read by anyone who is interested in the relationship between war and society and especially in the context of medicine and science.—Jeffrey S. Reznick, author of Healing the Nation: Soldiers and the Culture of Caregiving in Britain during the Great War and John Galsworthy and Disabled Soldiers of the Great War: With an Illustrated Selection of his Writings

Editorial Reviews

03/15/2014
Civil War medicine is generally associated with amputations on the battlefield, but Devine (research fellow, history of medicine, Schulich Sch. of Medicine & Dentistry, Western Univ., Canada, Ont.) shows how the war changed both the paradigms of medical inquiry and treatment and attitudes toward physicians as arbiters of scientific knowledge. Prior to the war, U.S. physician training was unregulated and far weaker than in Europe. Access to cadavers for dissection and anatomical study was strictly limited. The war gave physicians supporting the Union cause (Devine focuses on them because Confederate medical care was much more compromised owing to lack of supplies) much practical experience and impelled scientific investigations with newly advanced skills in areas such as dissection, pathological research, and microscope work. Furthermore Army Surgeon General William Alexander Hammond mandated that doctors share their findings by providing specimens, research results, and case histories to the Army Medical Museum and Library, which became an aggregator of medical information, playing a critical role in the dissemination of scientific knowledge. The push for learning and advances in medical understanding and care, impelled by wartime casualties, would ultimately lead to the development of medical specialties in succeeding decades. VERDICT Devine's book compares to Ira Rutkow's Bleeding Blue and Gray: Civil War Surgery and the Evolution of American Medicine, with her title very clearly explicating the transitions created by the war itself. Recommended to readers in the history of medicine or military medicine.—Rebecca Hill, Zionsville, IN

Library Journal

[Devine] makes a convincing case that at least one good thing came from the horror of the Civil War, namely the advancement of medicine.—America's Civil War



A thoroughly researched and detailed analysis of the Civil War's powerful impact on American medicine.—Journal of American History



A bold new interpretation of the impact of the Civil War on the profession of medicine in nineteenth-century America.—Bulletin of the History of Medicine



Recommended to readers in the history of medicine or military medicine.—Library Journal



An excellent book for anyone interested in Civil War medicine.—New York Journal of Books



A segment of the real war has gotten into Learning from the Wounded.—Civil War Book Review



This important work is a major contribution to knowledge about the development of medical practice and research protocols. It deserves a wide readership among advanced students, researchers, and faculty.—Choice



Learning from the Wounded presents a truly fresh thesis. This is a convincing book, well researched and written engagingly and enthusiastically.—Canadian Journal of History



Truly a seminal work. . . . Devine's work will undoubtedly become one of the most important illuminations of Civil War military medicine and a ground-breaker connecting that war on disease and injury to the rise of modern and scientific American medicine.—Journal of America's Military Past



There exists a massive bulk of raw data relating to the medicine and surgery of the Civil War era. Shauna Devine has diligently and tenaciously sifted out the salient parts to our eternal benefit.—On Point: The Journal of Army History

From the Publisher