Imagine now that you are lying injured on a bloody battlefield.  You might have been shot, bayoneted, or perhaps you are suffering a grave illness like typhoid fever.   You have been lying there for a long time, no doctor has come, and there is probably no way you can get to one in time.  If you are lucky, you might be taken to a crowded shack filled with other injured and dying people, and perhaps there are one or two doctors there.  If you are again lucky, a doctor might eventually see you.  You are put onto a blanket next to very sickly man who is coughing and spewing blood.   Flies are eating at your wounds, and your blanket is soiled by the diseased feces of the patient who slept there before you.  Soon, you too are coughing blood and looking very similar to the man next to you.  Either way, you will die from your injuries or illness, or you will die from catching the disease germs all around you.  This is what medical practice was like at the beginning of the Civil War.  Sadly, it was a war that made medical practitioners realize that such a disorganized system was unacceptable.

Before the war, there were no such things as an ambulances or real hospitals, and the necessity of sanitation was not truly recognized.  Women were thought of as terrible nurses, and doctors were in a terribly competitive rivalry.  All of this changed.  Because women were now needed and there was no time for rivalry, doctors, both male and female, worked side by side and eventually, realized each other’s talents.  Of the greatest achievements brought about by the war, the recognition of the importance of a hospital may be the greatest.  Before the war, the hospitals that existed were, dirty, smelly, and contaminated.  Such an establishment was certainly no place for anyone, especially the sick!  This brought up a serious problem. How were the sick to be taken care of? There was no way they could be left out on the battlefield, and there was no building large enough to hold an entire regiment of wounded.  Not only did hospitals have to be used, but they needed to be significantly larger, and they needed to be practically everywhere.  It was recognized that hospitals could be kept clean and healthy if windows were let open and instruments, hands, and beds were regularly cleaned. 

The picture  above shows one of the new hospital designs.  It shows the pavilion design where patients were separated into wards by affliction.   This arrangement somewhat stopped the transmission of disease in hospitals.  By 1862, by the orders of Union Assistant Surgeon General William Hammond, hospitals were being built all across the country, from Detroit to St. Augstine to New York to Indiana.  By 1865, in the Union alone, there were already 204 hospitals, with a total bed capacity of 136,894.  Most hospitals, Northern and Southern, consisted of two stories, and within a hospital, each ward was detached to keep germs from spreading.  An average hospital would include a kitchen, laundries, operating rooms, pharmacies, food cellars, ice houses, and a "dead house," more commonly known as a morgue. 

Today, hospitals can be very similar to those of the latter part of the Civil War.   Before this devastating war, there was no place that offered such a magnitude of healing.  For this reason, the Civil War was truly a revolution towards modern medicine.