Civil War Medicine By: Courtney
Fisher Jr./Sr. High School
Below you will find information on a Civil War Medicine Kit.
The medicine kit is a small leather kit, and is a black or brown color. The kit is old, and is falling apart. The strap that is used to put around the doctor or nurse, is also coming off. This artifact is now different. Instead of having a leather kit, we now have metal of plastic.
The purpose of this kit is to heal the wounded and the sick. The medicine would heal all types of wounds and sicknesses.
Surgeons used this artifact by applying medicine to the wounds, also, they used this to heal sicknesses and to put people to sleep.
This artifact helped to soldiers so that they could go out into war again, and fight for their country or state. Most of the medicine was successful.
I think it would have been difficult to use this medicine because all of the bottles were the same size, about three inches wide. They also, have almost the same color of liquid in most of them, and it would be hard to keep them separated and know which medicine is what.
Below you will find information on Surgical Equipment from the Civil War.
The surgical equipment is a silver color and is made from steel. Most of the equipment looks like scissors and they were varied in length and width. These tools were used around 1855-1860.
The bone cutter is used to saw the bone. This artifact is about 1 foot in length and 6 inches in width. It looks like a small version of a saw. The blood remover thins the blood of a person. This device, however, looks like many pocket knives in one. You can flip one out and they are different sizes. The size depends on where you are planning on thinning the blood out. This artifact was replaced by leeches. Although leeches are more dangerous, they still take the place of this. The mini ax is used to cut flesh. This artifacts is small and was used to tear open the flesh for surgery. The stitch scissors, were used to stitch up the flesh once it has been operated on.
This affected soldiers greatly. All of these tools that I have just named helped surgery go a lot faster and more pleasant.
I think these objects would have been hard to use before because back then, when they used these tools, it would be difficult to know where to cut the flesh, where all of the arteries are, and where all of the veins are. They did not have as much information as we do today.
Acknowledgments ~I would like to thank Mr. Peterson for helping me to find the information that I needed. I would also like to thank Trevor, who worked at the Early American Museum and helped me to find artifacts to use as a display.
Bibliography ~ Early American Museum, Lake of the Woods, Mahomet, IL.