William G White

Appropriate Treatment of Head Injuries by Surgeons During the Civil War William G White

Publisher Marketing: Surgeons during the Civil War have been classified by soldiers from that time period as incompetent butchers. However, evidence of head injury cases from the battles of Antietam, Gettysburg, The Wilderness, and Petersburg, evidence suggests that most surgeons were competent and followed the medical standards of practice of the 1860s. The civilian method of practicing medicine was similar to that of the military, although military surgeons found that procedures such as trephining met with more fatalities than their civilian counterparts. A possible reason for a high-mortality rate with military trephining may be due to the fact that the field environment in which the procedures were done was often dirty, and the head wounds became infected. Other contributing factors may be that surgeries were undertaken on a large numbers of patients using the same unclean instruments. The small sample size of severe head injuries indicates that the survival rate was approximately 35 percent of those who survived until they arrived at a major hospital. Infection appears to have been the most significant factor which indicated whether the patient would survive or die. Even so, the surgeons were not butchers and did the best they could given technology and medical knowledge at the time.