Historians of medicine commonly refer to the mid-19th century as the "medical Middle Ages" in the United States because of the lack of understanding about sanitation and contagion, and thanks to a medical profession that lagged behind its European counterparts in procedural knowledge, institutional structure and numbers of certified physicians.
Many of the terms you will see in the records have their roots in midieval terms - terms no longer in use and generally not known today.
When the war began, the Union Army medical division consisted of fewer than 100 surgeons and assistant surgeons. There was no organized ambulance service to remove wounded soldiers from the battlefield, and those who did make it to a squalid camp hospital fared little better than those left to die where they fell. With the help of the United States Sanitary Commission and a reorganization of the Army medical corps, which included the creation of an ambulance corps to rival any European army and a modern general hospital system across the nation, the Civil War revolutionized medical care in the United States.
It is widely accepted that disease claimed more lives than bullets during the Civil War. The first wave of infection hit new recruits soon after they arrived in camp. Men from rural areas were especially vulnerable, lacking immunity to the childhood diseases to which their urban counterparts most likely had been exposed.
This book is a great tool for genealogy and Civil War researchers. It explains in modern terms many of the old medical terms and diseases of the Civil War era and shows the diseases that were rampant among Civil War troops and how they had an impact on the outcome of the war.
SAMPLE PAGE
AGUE: Chills associated with fever; archaic term for malarial fever.
ANASARCA: A generalized infiltration of edema fluid into subcutaneous connective tissue.
ANTHRAX: A disease caused by infection of cutaneous anthrax characterized by hemorrhage in various organs and body cavities, with symptoms of severe prostration.
APOPLEXY: Obsolete term for cerebral stroke, most often due to hemorrhage.
ASTHENIA: Weakness or debility.
BILIOUS REMITTENT FEVER: Archaic term for relapsing fever characterized by bilious vomiting and diarrhea.
BUBOE/ BUBO: Inflammatory swelling of one or more lymph nodes, usually in the groin, usually suppurating.
CAMP FEVER: This term was used for all of the continuing fevers experienced by the army: Typhoid Fever, Malarial Remittent Fever, and Typho-malarial Fever. The last named is a combination of elements from the first two diseases. This combination, Typho-malarial Fever, was the characteristic "camp fever" during the Civil War. Symptoms included: a pronounced chill followed by an intermittent fever, abdominal tenderness and nausea, general debility, diarrhea, retention of urine, and furring of the tongue.
CARDITIS: Inflammation of the heart.
CATARRH: Inflammation of the mucous membranes with increased flow of mucous.
CEPHALALGIA: Headache.
CICATRIZED/ CICATRIX: Healed, formation of scar.
COMMINUTED: Broken into several pieces.
CONSUMPTION: Tuberculosis (also called Phthisis).