When you total up the numbers of all the soldiers who died during the Civil War, the sums are terrible. Over two and one-half million soldiers fought for the Union during the Civil War. Of that number, about 360,000 soldiers died. Over one million soldiers fought for the Confederacy during the long war; which about 285,000 died.
		What is most unbelievable, though, is that those 618,000 deaths, only 200,000 were the result of either being killed or wounded in a battle. That means only one out of every three soldiers who died during the war, died from being wounded or killed in the fighting. The other two out of three deaths were from disease. These deaths were not from being shot or even from the infections that soldiers sometimes developed while recuperating from being shot.
		Two out of three soldiers who died during the war, died from diseases like Measles, Mumps, Diarrhea, Pneumonia, and Typhoid Fever. These soldiers died because doctors didn't know how important it was that camps where the soldiers lived, be kept clean. The didn't know that eating the right foods and keeping clean would help protect the soldiers from disease. The soldiers died because doctors didn'y know that simple diseases would spread horribly fast in the overcrouded camps. They also died because doctors didn't have the kinds of medicines that we take for granted today. There were no antibiotics to fight infections. There were no vaccines to give to children to protect them for life against things like mumps ,measles, and tetanus- diseases that children today receive immunizations for so that they will never have to suffer from the disease.
	It is hard for us to believe that there was ever a time when people didn't know all these simple practices for taking care of themselves. It is necessary to understand this, so in order to understand why doctors during the Civil War were not able to prevent these soldiers from dying.
		It is important to understand that many surgeons had never even seen an operation done before the Civil War. Most of them listened to two years of medical lectures and read whatever books about medicine were available. Then they went out and learned medicine by working with doctors already in practice.
		The books they read were a mix of good advice and absolutely terrible advice. Take for example the recommendation to use one's finger to remove a bullet from a wound. Today that advise sounds horrible, because we know of all the germs we have on our hands. Even young children today are taught to wash their hands often. However we need to remember that even surgeons in the 1860s washed their hands occasionally, which was more than they did to their medical instruments. Surgeons wore large aprons to protect their clothes and just wipe their instruments off on front of their durty aprons. The did not care if the instruments were dirty as long as they were sharp so they could cut well. Maybe using their fingers actually was safer for the patients than using their instruments.
			Another horrible piece of advice that shows up in the medical texts of that time, is about "laudable pus". The books state that signs of pus coming from a wound three or four days after surgery was a sign of healing. In actual fact, the pus was a sign of severe bacterial infection caused by the doctors dirty hands and instruments. Yet the medical books praised "laudable pus" as a sign the body was healing itself.
				If there was one important piece of information that was missing from the doctors knowledge at the time, it is the knowledge about how didease was transmitted. Doctors didn't know about bacteria and viruses. They didn't know that people could become sick from other peoples dirty hands or from breathing other peoples germs in a crowded tent or hospital ward.
					One doctor states proudly of the fact that only two out of three deaths were from disease. He talks about the U S Army troops who fought in the Mexican War in 1848 and states that seven out of every eight deaths were from disease. He is proud that the percent had been brought down from 88% to 62% in the Civil War.
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