Confederate Medicine in the Civil War

When the southern states of the United States of America seceded from the Union to form the Confederate States, it led to the Civil War. This war was devastating to the nation, largely because so many men died from wounds received during battle and from disease. Charles Frazier's novel Cold Mountain is a fictional account of several people living in the Confederate States during the time of the Civil War. The book begins with the …

…unclean and over crowded. At the outset of the war, an education in medicine was mediocre, and there was new weapon technology that wounded soldiers in a fashion that doctors did not know how to handle. All this was complicated even more by the blockade, which the Union placed on the Confederacy. The combination of all these problems facing the medical community during this period resulted in a gross amount of deaths during the war.