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Posts about Download The Book Free Download Bleeding Blue and Gray: Civil War Surgery and the Evolution of American Medicine [Deckle Edge] [Hardcover] from mediafire, rapishare, and mirror link
A landmark chronicle of Civil War medicine, Bleeding Blue and Grayis a major contribution to our understanding of America’s bloodiest conflict. Indeed, eminent surgeon and medical historian Ira M. Rutkow argues that it is impossible to grasp the harsh realities of the Civil War without an awareness of the state of American medicine at the time.
At the outset of the war, the use of ether and chloroform remained crude, and they were often unavailable in the hellish conditions at the front lines. As a result, many surgical procedures were performed without anesthesia in the compromised setting of a battleground or a field hospital. This meant that “clinical concerns were often of less consequence,” writes Rutkow, “than the swiftness of the surgeon’s knife.”
Also, in the 1860s, the existence of pathogenic microorganisms was still unknown–many still blamed “malodorous gasses” for deadly outbreaks of respiratory influenza. As the great Civil War surgeon William Williams Keen wrote, “we used undisinfected instruments from undisinfected plush-lined cases, and still worse, used marine sponges which had been used in prior pus cases and had been only washed in tap water.”
Besides the substandard quality of wartime medical supplies and techniques, the combatants’ utter lack of preparation greatly impaired treatment. In 1861, the Union’s medical corps, mostly ill-qualified and poorly trained, even lacked an ambulance system. Fortunately, some of these difficulties were ameliorated by the work of numerous relief agencies, especially the United States Sanitary Commission, led by Frederick Law Olmsted, and tens of thousands of volunteers, among them Louisa May Alcott and Walt Whitman.
From the soldiers who endured the ravages of combat to the government officials who directed the war machine, from the good Samaritans who organized aid commissions to the nurses who cared for the wounded, Bleeding Blue and Graypresents a story of suffering, politics, character, and, ultimately, healing.
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- Hardcover: 416 pages
- Publisher: Random House; 1 edition (April 19, 2005)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0375503153
- ISBN-13: 978-0375503153
- Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.4 x 1.5 inches
- Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds
Free Download Bleeding Blue and Gray: Civil War Surgery and the Evolution of American Medicine
This book delivers a well written account of the politics and practices that led to revolutionary changes in American medicine during the Civil War.
Author Ira Rutkow is adept at exploring how medical realities taken for granted today, such as knowledge of bacteriology, a well defined concept of nursing, and a unified medical profession were all "rough drafts" of what exists today, if they existed at all.
One reads with shock how most "nurses" were wounded soldiers who cared for other wounded soldiers. In the era fifty years before women obtained sufferage in America, the nursing profession was rife with sexual harassment, incompetent leadership and riddled with more moral than medical concerns--that is, when women were included at all. It was fascinating to read that women nurses were valued more for their appearance (the ideal nurse was expected to be over 30 and "homely"--at least there was no ageism!) than any objective standards.
If nursing was abysmal, doctoring was worse. The author describes how gangrene was "cured" with undiluted hydrochloric acid, most injuries were treated with botched amputations, and everything else was "cured" with poisonous drugs like the mercury containing Calomel or tarter emetic that created "volcanic vomiting" and diarrhea, as per the allopathic concept of curing through purging and bleeding.
If that wasn't enough, different aid groups like the Sanitation Commission and the Christian Comission sabotaged each others' efforts in campaigns of backstabbing and malcontentery. These cynical machinations reached the highest echelons of U.S. government and advanced the careers of ambitious, unworthy men, while brushing visionary women and men to the wayside.
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