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Example research essay topic: United States Army Army Of The Potomac - 1,495 words

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"When the war began, the United States Army medical staff consisted of only the surgeon general, thirty surgeons, and eighty-three assistant surgeons. Of these, twenty-four resigned to "go South, " and three other assistant surgeons were promptly dropped for "disloyalty. " Thus the medical corps began its war service with only eighty seven men. When the war ended in 1865, more than eleven thousand doctors had served or were serving, many of these as acting assistant surgeons, un commissioned and working under contract, often on a part-time basis. They could wear uniforms if they wished and were usually restricted to general hospitals away from the fighting front. The Confederate Army began by taking the several state militias into service, each regiment equipped with a surgeon and an assistant surgeon, appointed by the state governors.

The Confederate Medical Department started with the appointment on May 4 of Daniel De Leon, one of three resigned United States surgeons, as acting surgeon general. After a few weeks he was replaced by another acting surgeon general, who on July 1, 1861, was succeeded by Samuel Preston Moore. He took the rank of colonel and stayed on duty until the collapse of the Confederacy. Dr. Moore, originally a Charlestonian, had served twenty seven years in the United States Army. He has been described as brusque and autocratic, a martinet.

He was also very hard working and determined, and he was progressive in his military-medical thinking. Dissatisfied with the quality of many of the surgeons of the state troops, he insisted that to hold a Confederate commission, every medical officer must pass examinations set by one of his examining boards. He disliked filthy camps and hospitals. He believed in "pavilion" hospitals-long, wooden buildings with ample ventilation and sufficient bed space for eighty to one hundred patients. Moore, with the compliance of the Confederate Congress and President Jefferson Davis, began the construction of many such hospitals when field activities demonstrated that the casualties would be high and the war long.

Dr. Moore maintained a cooperative relationship with Congress, successive secretaries of war, and President Davis, always subject to the availability of funds from the Confederate Treasury. In that era of "heroic dosing" Moore foresaw shortages in drugs, surgical instruments, and hospital supplies. He established laboratories for drug manufacture and took prompt steps to purchase needed supplies from Europe. In the course of time, capture of Union warehouses and hospitals played an increasing role in the Confederate supply. As an additional precaution he procured and distributed widely a book on native herbs and other plants that grew wild in the South and were believed to possess curative qualities.

As a result, despite frequent shortages of some drugs, the Confederate record was a good one. Meanwhile, in the old Union, Surgeon General Thomas Lawson, an octogenarian, obligingly died only weeks after Fort Sumter. He was replaced by Clement A. Finley, the sexagenarian senior surgeon who had served since 1818 and was thoroughly imbued with Lawson's parsimonious values. Lawson had wanted to keep the Army Medical Department much as it had been throughout his career, which meant that the eighty-seven surviving members of the medical corps had not had the kind of experience that would be needed in a major war. Yet now they were the senior surgeons of a rapidly expanding army.

Fortunately, immediately after the outbreak of war there was a swarming of humanitarians of both sexes who wanted to be of help to the citizen soldiers. Among the most clamorous was the Women's Central Association for Relief, of New York, all of whose officers were men. Soon there was a strong demand for the creation of a United States sanitary commission, patterned on the British Sanitary Commission, which had been formed to clean up the filth of the Crimean War. The tentative United States commission elected officers; the two most important were the president, Henry W. Bellows, a prominent Unitarian minister, and the executive secretary, Frederick Law Olmsted, superintendent of Central Park. The commission asked for official recognition by the War Department stating that its purpose was to "advise and assist" that department.

Surgeon General Finley, just beginning his incumbency, had no desire for a sanitary commission, but when that body promised to confine its activities to the volunteer regiments and to leave the regular army alone, he withdrew his objections, Secretary of War Simon Cameron then named a commission of twelve members, of whom three were army doctors. The United States Sanitary Commission quickly extended itself to 2, 500 communities throughout the North, the Chicago branch being especially proficient. The St. Louis people accomplished great things but insisted on remaining independent under the name of the Western Sanitary Commission. The women of the local branches kept busy making bandages, scraping lint, and sending culinary delicacies to army hospitals.

The national organization maintained a traveling outpost with the Army of the Potomac to speed sanitary supplies to the field hospitals of that army. In 1862 and again in 1864 the commission provided and manned hospital ships to evacuate Army of the Potomac sick and wounded to general hospitals as far from the front as New York City. Early in the war, and later when it seemed appropriate, the commission persuaded highly respected doctors to write pamphlets on sanitation and hygiene. These were widely circulated among both medical and line officers. Although often erroneous, these pamphlets presented the best thought of that pre-bacteriological era and did some good where surgeons could persuade their colonels to take the advice. In the absence of any medical inspectors, the commission induced a number of esteemed doctors to examine recruit camps and to report on cleanliness and on the professional adequacy of surgeons to hold their commissions.

Although the Southerners had some local and state relief organizations, they enjoyed nothing similar to the Sanitary Commission in scope or efficiency; yet in the effects of camp disease and unsanitary conditions, the Confederacy and the Union shared common experiences indeed. The two armies had similar experiences as their forces were being trained, usually in an instruction camp as a gathering place for the troops of each state. Medical officers did not know how to requisition drugs and medical supplies. Commissaries did not know how to requisition rations. It has been said that "the Americans are a warlike but unmilitary people, " and the first months of the Civil War proved the adage. Too many men, when entering the army after a lifetime of being cared for by mothers and wives, had a tendency to "go native" -to ignore washing themselves or their clothing and, worst of all, to ignore all regulations about camp sanitation, Each company was supposed to have a sink, a trench eight feet deep and two feet wide, onto which six inches of earth were to be put each evening.

Some regiments, at first, dug no sinks. In other cases the men, disgusted by the sights and odors around the sinks, went off into open spaces around the edge of the camp. The infestation of flies that followed was inevitable, as were the diseases and bacteria they spread to the men and their rations. Soon long lines of soldiers began coming to sick call with complaints of loose bowels accompanied by various kinds and varying degrees of internal discomfort.

The medical officer would make a slapdash diagnosis of diarrhea or dysentery an prescribe an astringent. He usually ascribed this sickness to the eating of bad or badly cooked food. Union Army surgeons were to come to use the term "diarrhea-dysentery, " lumping all the cases together as one disease. In fact, in many cases it was only a symptom of tuberculosis or malaria, though amoebic and bacillary dysentery-introduced into the South by slaves brought from Africa-was certainly present as well. It caused enormous sickness and many deaths. The Union Army alone blamed the disease for 50, 000 deaths, a sum larger than that ascribed to "killed in action. " It was even more lethal in the Confederate Army.

The diets of both armies did not help and were deplorably high in calories and low in vitamins. Fruits and fresh vegetables were notable by their absence, and especially so when the army was in the field. The food part of the ration was fresh or preserved beef, salt pork, navy beans, coffee, and hardtack-large, thick crackers, usually stale and often inhabited by weevils. When troops were not fighting, many created funds to buy fruits and vegetables in the open market.

More often they foraged in the countryside, with fresh food a valuable part of the booty. In late 1864, when Major General W. T. Sherman made foraging his official policy on his march from Atlanta to Savannah, his army was never healthier. As the war went on, Confederate soldiers were increasingly asked to subsist on field corn and peas. And the preparation of the food was as bad as the food itself, hasty, undercooked, and almost a...


Free research essays on topics related to: confederate army, united states army, sanitary commission, army of the potomac, eighty seven

Research essay sample on United States Army Army Of The Potomac

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