by Matthew Dearden

Created on: May 16, 2009

Surgery in the Civil War is misunderstood at best and horribly misconstrued at worst. Even during the war, surgeons were known as "butchers" and were called derisive names by citizens and soldiers alike. Soldiers had nightmares about getting injured and then being dragged onto operation tables and getting their limbs chopped off while they were screaming in agony. One witness in the war even proclaimed: "Tables about breast high had been erected upon which the screaming victims were having legs and arms cut off...The surgeons...armed with long, bloody knives and saws, cut and sawed away with frightful rapidity, throwing the mangled limbs on a pile nearby as soon as removed."[1] Even today, Hollywood has portrayed Civil War amputations as forms of inhuman torture. In a typical scene the patients get a swig of whiskey, are given a bullet to bite, and then summarily get their leg or arm sawed off. Is this a realistic picture?

Amputation was the most common form of surgery in the Civil War, and was done quite often by both the North and the South. Well over half a million men died in the Great War between the States and countless more were injured. Of the number that died, about 110,000 Union and 94,000 Confederate men died from wounds sustained in battle.[2] It is often reported that three out of every four wounds were in the extremities, but this statistic is very deceiving. The wound reports were often gathered at field hospitals, and many of the soldiers with more serious wounds (head or abdominal wounds) never made it to the hospital. They would often die much more quickly, or were considered to be hopeless cases and were left on the field of battle. Soldiers with wounds to the extremities were much more likely to survive the trip to the field hospitals, but an even more deadly trial awaited them there: the prospect of amputation. The Union army alone performed about 30,000 amputations through the course of the war. It was a quick, painful, and extremely bloody process that made even the strongest observers recoil in horror. However, it was a process that more likely than not saved countless lives.

One of the main reasons for the large number of amputations was the nature of wounds soldiers received in battle. The main culprit here was a little conical-cylindrical soft lead bullet known as the minie ball, newly developed in the 1840s by French Army captains Claude-Etienne Minie and Henri-Gustove Delvigne.

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