10/25/2006 The military section of the GaBartow website is currently under re-construction.  Please excuse the mess... Arlene Woody, Bartow County GenWeb Coordinator

The American Civil War
Bartow County, Georgia

"DIED OF . . . ."
Diseases of the Civil War



Edward Jenner vaccinating a child against smallpox

During the Civil War, disease became an equally formidable killer as the guns, swords and canons of the enemy. Georgia, especially, was a quiet, relatively secluded agricultural state, but as the war progressed, Georgian soldiers marching through other states were exposed to all manner of diseases. Even maladys which we now consider "childhood diseases" were able to strike and kill the strongest and bravest of soldiers. In addition, poor diet, poor sanitation, and exhaustion broke down the soldiers' immune systems and made them vulnerable to a witch's cauldron of unmerciful killer diseases.

The following is a brief list of sicknesses and diseases I have found while publishing these rosters:

Aphonia (Laryngitis)
Brain Fever (meningitis caused by bacteria and often fatal ~ aka cerebrospinal fever, cerebrospinal meningitis, epidemic meningitis)
Bronchitis
Chronic Diarrhoea (Diarrhea ~ symptom of Dysentery which killed the largest number of men on both sides ~ aka "The Tennessee Trots,” “The Virginia Quick Steps," etc.)
Disease
Erysipelas (Contagious skin disease, due to Streptococci with vesicular and bulbous lesions)
Fever
General Debility
Malaria
Measles
Pneumonia (Lung infection or inflammation)
Typhoid fever (A gastrointestinal condition caused by a bacterial infection, usually as a form of food poisoning. Typhoid fever is unrelated to the similarly named typhus, a tick-borne infection.)
Typhoid Pneumonia
Typhus (Infectious fever characterized high fever, headache, and dizziness. A general name for various arthropod-borne rickettsial infections. Rickettsia: Parasitic microbes usually spread by insect bites.)
Variola (Smallpox)
Wounds
Yellow Fever (Yellow fever is a mosquito-borne viral disease. Illness ranges in severity from an influenza-like syndrome to severe hepatitis and hemorrhagic fever.)

For more information on this subject, see the following sites:

Dr. James I. Robertson, Jr., acclaimed Civil War historian, has said: "The Civil War has been called many things. Among them is the belief that the struggle was 'one vast experiment in the determination of how much injury the human body can endure.'”

Edward Jenner (English) invented a vaccine for smallpox in 1796. Even though a vaccine was available by the time of the Civil War, people at that time probably did not have wide-spread access to the vaccine as they do now. Indeed, the volume of vaccine needed for the soldiers of both sides probably wasn't available even if the doctors had the means to obtain it.

Penicillin was invented by Sir Alexander Fleming in 1928, too late to save those lost in the great Influenza Pandemic of 1918 and certainly too late for the suffering soldiers of the American Civil War.

Measles Vaccine is a fairly recent invention, Enders & Peeples (USA) having refined it in 1954. Until that time, this illness continued to cause diarrhea, damage to eyes, pneumonia, encephalitis, seizures and death as it still does in third world countries who don't have access to the vaccine.

Malaria remains a world-wide killer of 1 million people who don't have access to treatment by prescription drugs.

 

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Last modified: October 25, 2006