March 10, 2014
Kathryn Shively Meier: A Civil War Soldier Beats the Odds on the Virginia Peninsula
From the summer of 1861 to the spring of 1862, each Confederate or Union soldier was sick an average of three times. It was also the norm for soldiers to shun official army medical care, as they found the medicines loathsome and dreaded being separated from their regiments, often familiar faces from back home. Though contemporary physicians were still caught up in such theories of disease causation as the four humors (the conception that illness occurred when the four main bodily fluids were in need of recalibration), laypeople preferred environmental explanations for sickness that could be confirmed by observation and personal experience. Continue Reading Kathryn Shively Meier: A Civil War Soldier Beats the Odds on the Virginia Peninsula
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