Ira Rutkow
Section on Medical History, College of Physicians of Philadelphia
Time: 6:30pm
Location: College of Physicians of Philadelphia
During the Civil War, America's physicians learned about diseases and their clinical manifestations on a scale never before possible. The war created surgeons from doctors who previously had minimal operating experience. Physicians who had minimal background in treating complex illnesses and communicable infections experienced a lifetime of practice in several years of camping, marching, and conflict. America's healers acquired administrative skills not feasible in antebellum America. For the first time, the nation's physicians organized ambulance corps, assembled hospital trains, served on draft boards, resolved questions of medical manpower, and designed, staffed, and managed vast general hospitals. Finally, the scale and urgency of the war imposed much needed comradeship and discipline. "The constant mingling of men of high medical culture with the less educated had value," wrote S. Weir Mitchell, "and the general influence of the war on our art was, in this and other ways, of great service." Physicians familiarized themselves with disease and injury on an individual plane while the profession unified on a national level.