1. Beyond the Glory: Commonalities of Being a Soldier

2. Life of a Civil War soldier
Absolute guarantees: dread, dehydration, diarrhea, disease, despair
Probabilities: disability, death
Gettysburg: Union soldiers collect 37,574 rifles from battlefield
24,000 still loaded
6,000 had bullets in chamber
12,000 had 2 bullets in chamber

3. By the Numbers 2.8 million served for Union army
800,000 served for the Confederacy
750,000 deaths

4. Hospitals Crude, disease ridden places 3 treatments:
Emetic-makes you throw up (balance body’s humors
Eruma- gives you diarrhea
Lancet- cuts veins to bleed poison out

5. Medicine
Calomel: mercury & chloride – prescribed for almost every disease – mercury poisoning
1863-surgeon general banned
Amputation: rifles had low velocity
Hope to prevent infection
No sterilization(no scalding water, no cleaning saw)
14% of Union soldiers died from wounds

6. Types of Injuries Gunshot wounds: 230,000 Disease: 225,000
Sypillis/Gonorrhea – 182,000
Union army legalized & regulated prostitution in occupied Nashville & Memphis, TN during war.
Army official referred to Memphis as the “Gonorrhea of the West”
Opium addiction

7. Prison Camps
Soldiers in both prison camps treated about the same – officers treated better
Andersonville: 100 prisoners died per day (starvation or exposure)
Camp commander was tried and hanged after war.

8. Nurses Women nurses seen as scandalous.
Soldiers respond better to female nurses.
Work in battlefield hospitals
Clara Barton: founded the American Red Cross

9. Life on the Home Front Confederacy facing food shortage
Food riots (Richmond)
Women working on farms while men are off fighting
North: industries booming
Women working in factories