To Kill A Civil War Soldier It all ended on May 9, 1865. Over 620,000 soldiers, combined from both sides, died during the Civil War ever since the Confederates had bombarded Union soldiers at Fort Sumter, South Carolina, on April 12, 1861. It is a common misconception that most of those soldiers died during the bloody battles in action. In fact, twice as many of Civil War soldiers died from infection and disease than the various battle wounds one could receive, from getting shot clean through from a Minié ball to being blown to smithereens by a cannon. The point of this paper, however, is not to give you calculations of the deceased, but to give you some information about the medical treatments that were used at the time for the wounded. The book The Killer Angels by Michael Shaara touches upon some medical treatments amidst fictional first-hand accounts of a few of the men from both Union and Confederate sides. Confederate General Robert Edward Lee had been plagued by heart disease even before his service in the Civil War, which would later be the death of him (p.xvi). There is much controversy involving …show more content…
328-329). Unlike Reynolds, Armistead had the unfortunate experience of dying from an infection that had set in. As stated earlier, infectious wounds were a major cause of death in patients, even in those who had acquired non-fatal lacerations. The reasons behind infections and disease being a type of epidemic were the fact that army camps themselves were filthy and crowded, the hospitals nursing downed soldiers hardly any better. Hospitals were usually makeshift and always understaffed, and the use of antiseptic or sanitizing surgical tools were rare if at all, allowing germs to fester everywhere and anywhere. Another reason was that characteristics of infection were thought to be signs of healing, for example,