As I was looking at all the junk in my medicine cabinet this morning, for some reason my mind went to wondering if a Civil War doctor would find it useful. So picture this. It’s the day after a large battle in the American Civil War (or really any war of the 19th century). There are wounded and dying soldiers everywhere. We time-travel some doctors to a modern day pharmacy, but they can’t have any of the prescription medicine, just the over-the-counter stuff. What would be most useful to them?
My first thoughts are antibacterial creams, clean bandages, and maybe ibuprofen. But would any of this actually make a difference in saving soldier’s lives?
Hell, with the on-shelf contents of a regular Walgreeens or CVS I could save soldiers’ lives, and what I know about medicine you could fit on a postage stamp.
It was mostly not the injuries, but the infections and the godawful living conditions that did them in - that or simply bleeding out from massive trauma before anyone could get to them hours later.
Sterile saline, sterile bandages, rubbing alcohol, hydrogen peroxide, vaseline, honey, saran wrap, sewing needles, sanitary pads, ibuprofen aspirin tylenol, immodium and kaopectate, and sugar-free candy to clear out their systems, and I could certainly take a crack at it.
Not to mention Betadine as a pre-surgery scrub and topical antibiotics like bacitracin & neomycin. Of course, you would have to explain and convince them to believe the germ theory of disease.
I wonder if OTC antibiotic creams are strong enough.
In my accident, my leg was degloved over the entire hamstring with a large part avulsed. The wound was “heavily contaminated with gravel, dirt and debris”(surgical report).
Despite being in the OR less than an hour after being hit, I was on IV antibiotics for five weeks.
People used to survive injuries like that before antibiotics. Not nearly as often, of course, and they usually had severe scarring and disability afterwards, but they did survive it.
The IV antibiotics were not only to combat any infection already present, but to avoid them getting worse and prevent new ones.
The other thing is that during the Civil War no bacteria had had a chance to develop antibiotic resistance. Any antibiotic you used on such a hypothetical time trip would be maximally effective.
So, no, the OTC ones wouldn’t be able to save everyone, or cure everything, but they would certainly help and for some percentage of people be the difference between life and death.
I’d add Pedialyte to that list. Its been shown to save lives today in people with Ebola - and diarrhea took out a lot of Civil War soldiers.
The problem would be the quantity required. Sterile bandages would have made a big difference, but you’d need them in quantities beyond what your average Walgreens carries to do more than put a dent in the death count.
Frankly a visit to REI for decent boots and jackets and socks would have saved lives. That was a truly hellish war - I suppose they all are, but modern wars don’t tend to have as many people taking long marches in winter without boots.
The modern sanitary pad came about from bandages developed in WWI - the super-absorbent material could sop up enough blood to wear long enough for the bleeding to stop.
Order 100,000,000 pads.
Insulated boots, blankets - a few million
50 million bars of soap, 20 million folding buckets, and water purification tablets (the water downstream of a battlefield was nasty).
Any antibiotic ointment or fever-reducer - hell Aspirin was a wonder drug when it was introduced.
They had opium - you can get codeine from the pharmacy window without a script - prbably faster acting.
Lidocaine would be a huge comfort item - back up a couple of box cars.
As somebody pointed out, I think a modern doctor with OTC would stand a better chance than a CW era doctor with the same stuff.
Still, the sanitation/infection battle would be very difficult. And the amount of physical trauma that resulted from minie balls and the like was gnarly. Makes modern ammo seen surgical by comparison. The Yanks and Rebs were essentially shooting each other with the soft lead sinkers used to weigh down a fishing line.
Yeah, but look at it this way: you could give soldiers with diarrhea the Pedialyte and OTC anti-diarrheals, thereby saving the opium for pain management and the worst cases of diarrhea.
Throughout history, up to and including the American Civil War, doctors and surgeons were two completely different things. Surgeons performed surgery (which, back then, 99.9% of the time simply meant amputations) while ‘doctors’ went to actual medical schools and treated ailments. There was a very distinct class division between the two as well. Doctors were from the upper class and attended universities and generally only treated people with money (the rich). Surgeons were tradesmen, more akin to barbers or barrel makers, who learned their trade thru apprenticeships. And although not everything taught in medical schools then was total quackery a great deal of it was. Human medical treatment was as much (or more) a religious thing rather than a science. The insides of the human body were viewed less as a collection of systems (like a machine) and more as a spiritual object driven by divine magic.
Anyway, the Civil War was kind of the perfect storm for wartime death. It took place during the industrial revolution, so firearms had replaced melee weapons (swords etc.which were now mostly ceremonial) but as is always the case the technology outpaced the tactics. Unlike smooth bore muskets which were wildly inaccurate, a rifled-barrel weapon was accurate at rages of 500 yards. But tactics still dictated disciplined, massed fire at ridiculously closer ranges. Hence the horrific casualty rates.
Then add to this the fact that the War took place right before the medical revolution. It seems so common sense to us today but things like merely keeping wounds (and even more so, medical tools) clean was meaningless before Pasteur’s Germ Theory. Its true that far more Civil War soldiers died of disease than bullets. And of those actually wounded in battle a great many more died of complications (i.e. infection) even after surviving the initial physical trauma.
They did use it for everything, but there was a shortage. Opium poppy gardens were common during the Civil War and doctors who ran out were forced to amputate without it. In particular in the South, where the blockade was pretty darn effective and the confederate dollar not worth much on the international market, opium became a very treasured commodity. But they also did not have limitless supplies in the North.
One of my ancestors died of dysentery (at the battle of Ticonderoga, not the CW, but it’s pertinent to my viewpoint) so I’d go with anything to increase sanitation, control diarrhea, and kill germs- irrigation of wounds is still done to debulk the load of foreign objects (grit, lead, shit) and schlopping on antibiotic ointment can only help.
If you are out of opium, try tinctures. The higher proof, the better, barley, corn or rye, I don’t mind ;). Use as anesthetic, cleanser, instrument cleaner.
You’d also want to take along a good supply of latex or nitrile gloves so you didn’t shoot yourself in the foot and infect them with modern, antibiotic-resistant thingies.
