Originally published on September 5, 2022 (Episode 278)
Introduction
When Confederate cannons fired on Fort Sumter in April 1861, the United States Army numbered only 16,000 soldiers, supported by a medical staff of just 113 doctors. Across the entire country, perhaps as few as 300 physicians had ever witnessed surgery or treated a gunshot wound.
Over the next four years, those numbers would expand dramatically. The unprecedented casualties of the American Civil War demanded equally unprecedented changes in medical practice. As Carole Adrienne shows in Healing a Divided Nation: How the American Civil War Revolutionized Western Medicine (Pegasus, 2022), those changes reverberate today—in every ambulance, every vaccination, every woman in the workforce, and every Black university graduate.
About the Guest
Carole Adrienne received her B.F.A. from Moore College of Art and Design in Philadelphia. She has organized archives for Old St. Joseph’s National Shrine, chaired “Archives Week” in Philadelphia, and served on advisory panels for the Philadelphia Archdiocesan Historic Research Center, The Mütter Museum’s “Civil War Medicine” exhibit, and its “Spit Spreads Death: The 1918 Flu Epidemic” exhibit. She is currently working on a documentary film series on Civil War medicine and lives in Philadelphia.
For Further Investigation
Carole Adrienne, Healing a Divided Nation: How the American Civil War Revolutionized Western Medicine (Citadel, 2022)
Mutter Museum Exhibition: “Broken Bodies, Suffering Spirits”
Clara Barton National Historic Site and Clara Barton Missing Soldiers Museum
Dorothea Dix, social reformer and Superintendent of Nurses during the war
Thomas Eakins’ The Gross Clinic (1875), a landmark portrait of American surgery
Related episodes:
The Great War and Modern Medicine — how WWI transformed medical practice worldwide
Mad Dogs and Other New Yorkers — rabies and medicine in late 19th-century America
💬 Listen & Discuss
The Civil War forced American medicine to innovate—or collapse. Do you think national crises always accelerate medical change? Share your reflections in the comments and forward this episode to anyone interested in the history of health and healing.
