Civil War Medicine vs. Colonial Medicine:
How Civil War medicine is better
Presented to
Ryne Jungling
Mandan High School
In Fulfillment of the Requirements of AP History
By
Natasha Troxel
16 December 2016
In the 1700s, Americans owed their medical knowledge to the colonists. It was not until 1861, when the Civil War began, that Americans started realizing that they needed to make changes. The Civil War had a major influence on medicine in America. Other than the fact that medicine during the Civil War was more modernized than that during the colonial times, there are many other factors that give evidence that medicine during the Civil War was just simply better. It had improved because the people were more educated,
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Yes, there were people during the colonial period who had helped expand the colonists knowledge of medicine, like Aristotle, but nothing to significant. Aristotle was a Greek philosopher who believed everything was made from earth, fire, air or water. He said that the earth was cold, fire was hot, air was dry, and that water was wet. Five hundred years after Aristotle made his discovery there was a man by the name of Galen who took Aristotle’s ideas and went more in depth with them. Galen used elements to explain illnesses and diseases. He said that your blood/air was hot and wet, yellow bile/fire was hot and dry, black bile/earth was dry and cold, and that phlegm/water was cold and wet. Galen called these ‘humors’, he said when you have a proper balance you were considered to be healthy and when you had an improper balance it was suspected that there was a disease present. In 1668 a man named Hermann Boerhaave was born. Eventually this man theorized that disease is an imbalance of natural activities and that a fever was the bodies attempt to keep from dying. Boerhaave suggested that digestion and circulation could be explained by mechanical ideas and that three conditions led to disease: salty, putrid, and oily conditions in the body. He said in order to fix this you have to sweeten the acid, purify the stomach and rid impurities through bleeding and purging. Although his theories are still used today, the others really did nothing to shape societies medical knowledge. Unlike the colonists, the people of the Civil War era not only helped influence medicine but helped influence America and its people. These people also were some of the most respectable people during the Civil War. For starters, Dorothea Lynde Dix was the head of the US Army's nursing corps. Dix, who was also known as