Tag: American Civil War
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African American medical pioneers
Mariel TishmaChicago, Illinois, United States The road for African Americans in the medical professions has not been easy. Enslaved Africans received no education.1 During the first half of the nineteenth-century medical schools in the North would admit only a very small number of black students. Even after the Civil War, African Americans continued to be…
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William Bell: Photographed injured veterans
William Bell was a veteran of the American Civil War who fought at Antietam and Gettysburg, and became chief photographer of the Army Medical Museum in Washington. He took photographs of injured soldiers as part of a project to document the range of injuries among veterans. On the left, the solider is cleverly posed in…
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Banishing that dread of being cut
Samuel SpencerReading, Berkshire, UK In 1863, Confederate General Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson was returning to camp after routing Federal armies at Chancellorsville, when he was mistaken for a Union cavalryman by his own sentries. In his long military career Jackson had been lucky enough to escape the bullets of Mexican grenadiers, Seminole guerrillas, and the cannonballs…
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Doctor and dictionary
For almost two decades beginning in 1882, Dr. William Chester Minor, retired army surgeon and captain of the Union Army during the American Civil War, labored unceasingly, day after day, reading and researching sixteenth and seventeenth century books, making notes on more than 12,000 slips of paper, and mailing them to the Scriptorium of Dr.…
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Elizabeth Blackwell, MD
JMS PearceEast Yorkshire, England Although Elizabeth Blackwell was portrayed on an 18 cent US stamp in 1974, curiously this was over a century after she graduated in medicine (Figure 1). Many remain unaware of her remarkable story as the first female Anglo-American physician, campaigner, and medical suffragette (Figure 2).1 She was born to a practising…
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The American Civil War as a biological phenomenon: Did Salmonella or Sherman win the war for the North?
Michael BrownChicago, Illinois, United States Reexamining Civil War deaths A demographic historian, J. David Hacker, recently discovered an unfortunate truth; using newly digitized data from the 1860, 1870, and 1880 censuses, he constructed new estimates of Northern and Southern Civil War deaths. In his pivotal analysis published in 2012, the death toll in the American…