The Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War

[Condem]

By Drew Faust Gilpin, President of Harvard. I've been studying the Civil War for forty years now and the numbers never cease to amaze me. Based on population, the % killed between 1861-1865 today would be 6 million. It just had a vast impact on many generations to come. Fascinating.

[customerserviceguy]

1. Not sure where I read it

but I do recall that more soldiers died of venereal disease than died on the battlefield. Especially from the North. The South actually instituted a program where they tested women who were sex workers, and more Southern soldiers ended up eventually with malaria, which killed the syphilis that they got during the war.

Dr Juliers Wagner-Jauregg actually won a Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1927 for using malaria to treat this disease, after observing that malaria patients were able to shake the bacteria.

[Condem]

2. Not true,customerserviceguy,

Sure, dysentary and other diseases were huge killers. But the battlefield losses were, to this day, unknown. No good record keeping among the regiments. Impossible to know the true numbers. Just immense.

[Captain Hilts]

4. I just read that infection-based diseases, often from wounds, are what killed most folks.

I've never read the VD angle. It doesn't really make sense.

[happyiowan]

3. Gettysburg. My father took me there when I was a child.

Such a holy place. More so than any church. The aura there is amazing!