Frederick, Maryland

     Mike and I spent an pleasant day in Frederick, Maryland.  We checked out the Canal Walk, poked around a huge antique and architectural salvage store, strolled around town, had lunch in one of the many restaurants, and visited the National Museum of Civil War Medicine.

Mike along the Canal Walk.  Check out the big fish in the water.

I couldn't resist pretending to grab the window sill in this trompe l'oeil painting.

Is it going to rain?

Gee, not my best angle.  This fellow stands at the entrance to the National Museum of Civil War Medicine.  He's there so you can take a Civil War selfie.  

          I wondered why we have a National Museum of Civil War Medicine.  I thought the so-called doctors of the era hacked off injured limbs without anesthetizing patients, and spread infection from soldier to soldier with their bloody, ungloved hands.  I had to revise those notions after viewing the museum's displays.  There were many developments in medicine around the time of the Civil War.  Some doctors had no formal training, but others attended medical school and served apprenticeships with established physicians.  Medical schools were springing up everywhere and medical theory was moving away from leeches and bleeding patients to other schools of thought - homeopathy being the fastest growing of the new philosophies.  Civil War MD's were quick studies who realized that bleeding a person who had already lost a large volume of blood was the wrong way to go.  The museum had pictures of some wounded soldiers who had plastic or reconstructive surgery, and the results were pretty good in some cases. Anesthesia was commonly used at the time of the Civil War, and 95% of patients received it.  So, biting the bullet was a fallacy.  And amputations were the usual course of treatment for wounded extremities, not because doctors were unskilled, but because the minié ball ammunition used by soldiers shattered bones into so many pieces that removal of the limb was the only option.
     Museum displays bring to attention the diversity among people fighting this war.  It wasn't just that Afro-Americans joined up to fight for the Union side.  Children fought the war on both sides, if not as soldiers then as musicians.  Women, both black and white worked as nurses.  Some women were spies.  There were even women who served as soldiers without ever being discovered as transvestites.  One veteran soldier lived out her life, collecting a Civil War pension, and it wasn't discovered that she was a woman until after she died.
     The sheer number of Civil War dead lead to advancement in embalming methods and the development of mortuary science as a profession.  Undertakers set up shop near battle sites and field hospitals.  The dead had to be embalmed so the bodies would not decompose before they were shipped back to relatives.
     So all of the above is interesting and only slightly gruesome.  You get the point of the museum when you come to the final exhibit.  It's a display of modern military medicine.  The system of treating and evacuating military casualties today is the same as it was during the Civil War.  The Letterman Plan, developed by Dr. Jonathan Letterman, director of the Army of the Potomac in 1862 and 1863, included first aid stations at the front lines, mobile field hospitals, an ambulance corp, and use of the principles of triage for sorting out the injured.  Medical treatments have improved in the last 150 years, but no one has come up with anything better than the Letterman Plan.
     George Wunderlich is the Executive Director of the Museum of Civil War Medicine.  Check out his video: