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Archive for the ‘Mercy Street PBS’ Category
A Civil War chaplain’s work was harrowing, improvised, and all too often underappreciated.
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Military medical illustration came of age during the early 1860s with the outbreak of the Civil War.
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After emancipation, what came next? Overcrowded and unsanitary, health conditions in contraband camps made freedpeople increasingly susceptible to smallpox.
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Devotees of this controversial science believed that the shape of one’s skull reflected the form of the brain and therefore revealed inner character.
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Meet Silas Weir Mitchell, the father of neurology in America.
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Over 95% of Civil War surgeries occurred under anesthesia.
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In the months after the Battle of Gettysburg, a Frederick resident made an explosive discovery along one of the city’s busiest thoroughfares.
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A sea-change in embalming came with the Civil War, during which there was an outcry for fallen soldiers to be returned to their families for burial.
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When we think of Civil War medicine, we often think of gore, like amputated limbs and bloody gunshot wounds. But these traumatic injuries did not make up the majority of a Civil War surgeon’s daily work. Instead, it was the camp diseases like dysentery and typhoid, infectious disease like smallpox, and – as we saw in this week’s episode of Mercy Street – venereal diseases.
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This week’s episode was full of Civil War slang. We’ve put together a list of some of our favorites. What do you think they mean?
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