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Emma Toner
Billings 82
5/5/10
Treating Diseases in the Civil War Notes
• Measles, which was a highly contagious disease, had symptoms that included a fever, a cough,
and rashes.
• The disease was most common among newly recruited soldiers who came from rural areas and
therefore had not been exposed to the disease before, unlike recruits from the larger cities, who
had come in contact with measles, among other diseases, already.
• When a measles epidemic hit, between one-third and the large majority of the regiment could
contract the disease. These epidemics generally lasted between one and two months, which
eventually left all infected soldiers useless to the war.
• Because new soldiers tended to contract the disease, more experienced soldiers tended to leave
them in camp to be cared for until the disease passed. However, there were far worse diseases,
such as sequelae (a group of dangerous diseases that were much worse than the measles), that
affected soldiers because the measles temporarily weakened the immune system.
• Malaria, which was caused by a bite from an infected anopheles mosquito, was much more
common in the South and some of the Midwest rather than the North.
• Once the mosquito carrying malaria infected a soldier, the soldier would, after seven to
fourteen days, begin to show symptoms of the disease.
• The first major symptom was a terrible chill, accompanied by bad shivering. Soon after the
shivering came a high fever that could raise a soldier's body temperature to almost 106 degrees.
• Soldiers would have "attacks", which lasted approximately ten to fifteen hours and consisted of
bursts of chills and high fevers.
• Even if a soldier contracted the disease, it never actually "passed"; basically, the soldier would
never become immune to it. Whenever the person became tired or weaker in any way, they
would be greeted once again with the familiar malaria attacks.
• It was hard to prevent malaria during the Civil War because nobody understood that the disease
was spread through mosquito bites. Many doctors believed that it was spread through "bad air",
or malodorous vapors that usually came from swamps and bogs. For this reason they moved
many army camps away from wet, dank swamps and found that it decreased malaria infections
by a large margin, but for the wrong reason; what they were really doing was moving the
soldiers away from mosquitos' breeding grounds.
• Tetanus, a disease also known as lockjaw because the initial symptom is a frozen and nearly
immovable jaw, was fairly uncommon during the Civil War but killed nearly everyone who
contracted it.
• Once a soldier had tetanus, they would not only suffer from the lockjaw, which made it hard to
breathe and swallow, but also had painful muscle spasms. A patient could die from the disease
in a couple of hours up to a few days.
• Doctors had not had much experience before, so many thought that the disease was caused by
poisoned bullets, badly cleaned wounds, or problems caused by doctors treating the patient
before.
• It was hard for doctors to do anything to help the patients besides treat their symptoms, which
usually did not end up working too well either. Because tetanus is an infection of a wound,
Emma Toner
Billings 82
5/5/10
some doctors, who realized this, decided to amputate the entire area, which saved ten out of the
twenty-nine patients that it was performed on.
• Historians believe that, because tetanus is also often caused by manure (specifically from
horses), there were few cases of tetanus because most fields that battles were fought on were
not covered in manure.
• Another extremely dangerous and contagious disease was tuberculosis (TB), which affected
soldiers in both the North and South.
• Disease mainly affected the lungs, and was usually spread by coughing, sneezing, spitting,
drinking milk from infected cows, or using dirty cooking utensils. A big problem was that
doctors did not realize that TB was infectious, and therefore kept patients with TB in the same
vicinity as everyone else.
• In the early stages of TB, the infected soldier could show little or no signs that he was carrying
TB. As the disease progressed it became more obvious because the infected members of the
army suffered from symptoms such as a bad cough, chest pain, coughing up blood, fevers,
sweats, weight loss, and weakness.
• Because it was hard to tell if a person had TB in the early stages of the disease, many
prospective soldiers were accepted into the army even though they were already sick. If, when
entering into the army, a doctor found a person to have TB, they would reject the man
immediately.
• The disease was so bad that it was second only to gunshot wounds in terms of discharges from
the army: 20,403 white Union soldiers were released because they had contracted TB.