pressed that engine all power line likeness that are -- harolding every variety of additional come-pound that man could invent. is in other words we had no idea what we were doing. having now bashed doctors, as i have done for the last ten minutes, now i'm going to spend m ten minutes going forward. i don't want you to think that there were no good things going on in business. there were some very famous things. there was a book in 1835, the beginnings of anesthesia. this was taken about seven months after the initial invention of anesthesia. there were no cameras, so everything was posed later. and if you look at his leg right over here, watch the next

picture, there is the blood. so this is early use of anesthesia. at the time no doctor could conceive diseases and treatments in anything resembling today's scientific terms. the treatments consisted of herbal and mineral practices. the fact that there would soon be fundamental developments such as radiology, bacteriology -- nor did it matter that the most important qualities of modern medical thought, scientific attitude, a willingness to question authority. adesire to learn from clinical experiences and a drive to modify therapeutic practices that these will be the mainstays of the late 19th century medicine. a great revolution could be

heralded by several. but unfortunately ourive war -- would not benefit one iota from this coming reck exclamation, filth, diseases prepailed. this is william goodell, he's buried at south lake cemetery in vermont. 40 years old, he's at white oaks swamp in virginia, 1862, he gets knocked unconscious by a shell. it knocks his knapsack off his back, he gets thrown to the words. on examination, no external lesion of the head or spine was discovered and he had no par l paralys

paralysis. he was totally insensitive to all soichbtd. he was in a word deaf and dumb. this is from his record. so what happened before mr. goodell? the diagnosis was congestion of the brain. he gets admitted to saturday hospital. which you'll see a picture of later in philadelphia. treatment, blood taken from the cup at the back of the ears. they would put a kurp at the back of your neck, they would put a fire to it, let the blood come out. a mercury derivative, they are deadly poisonous. they were the most common drugs they used to do for people. so much so that mercury poisoning was so rampant in the military that they had to stop it and mercury poisoning is pretty severe, to the point that you would have gangrene of your entire face and your skin and

mandible would stop offer. communication by a writing slate, confirmed reality of symptoms. somebody said hey, put the guy to sleep, if he answers your questions, he's not deaf and dumb. and finally electroshock therapy, they had the beginnings of electricity, they would touch you with the wires and you get a shock, nothing helped. result, december 10, 1862. this is now about six months after the shell bounded him. two days later he has a seizure, by mid-december he remains perfectly deaf and dumb. does it end there in outcome, a year later he's discharged with disability and pension, in 1876,

his doctor in vermont says he's totally incapacitated of all labor a year later he's quite lame and in 1899 dies. why is this important? because it sort of shows you medical care as it existed at the time of the civil war. and more importantly, these are people that we didn't get to read about. he didn't die during the war, but he really did die because of the water. the civil war was a dirty war, both in a literal and a figurative sense. this is an example of savage statement in virginia, these were all the war dead, this was what was going on, they did not understood anti-sepsis, they did not understand germs, bacteria didn't exist in their minds, it mint nothing. so we're going to look at this big bang theory, and there are three things that this big bang theory did. first was it divided positions with political experience that

they could never have got on otherwise by jut sitting around in an office in a little town in america. three years of tramping through the woods and camping, they learned about a lot of diseases. that's the first thing, clinical observation, they learned how to organization ambulances and hospitals and finally they had this camaraderie, this national concept of i need to be friends with the guy over there who's a doctor so we can get along and fix things. so there were all these different diseases, these diseases were seen by these men that they would never have had a chance to see them. this is this concept of political experience. this is a disease that doesn't even exist anymore, hospital gangrene. finally summery. though here is a bullet wound, entry, exit, and here is the operation. that is the operation. that's how he was left. so you're looking at his fee her, the condyles his pat tell

la is gone there,'s no skin grafts, there was nothing, this was what he was left with. a morning's work, this is what the civil war was about, amputations and more amputati amputations. these were not sterilized. and finally a picture. why i do show this picture and why do i talk about specialization nnd clinical experience? interns, what you and i would call interns and -- during the war everybody was a surgeon, everybody was allowed to operate. that stopped by the end of the war. towards 186 h, they said you know this is really crazy. you have to be poor if you specialize in medicine. it starreded in the civil war, this jonathan letterman was a medical director of the civil war said hey, no, we're having three people operating the rest

of you guys are not operating. so the rest of the people became very tuned in to summery. they learned to operate. once the war was over, these men, the hundreds of them would then go out to little towns and scattered. then there was this concept of ambulances. we never had any ambulances during the war, initially. in fact when the war started, the idea was that the six should take care of the sick. if i were wounded on the battlefield, it was very simple. i was sort of left on my own, and maybe my friend who was also wounded would try and help me, but if i was sick, i was expendable. they didn't want to take a healthy soldier and expend them taking care of my. this all changed during the course of the war. and there's some pictures of people learning how to take care of ambulances. doctors began to understand that on the battlefield you have to take care of the wounded, you have to take care of the sick,

they learned how to do this. they learned the entire concept of organizationization. boats would take combatants that were pounded up and down the rivers, these all became floating hospitals, something was introduced during the war. then finally the great hospitals of the civil war. by the time of the civil war, growing emphasis on maximizing the circulation of air along the desire for cleanliness, spaces and eventual lags found life in the form of these pavilion popt hospitals. that was the one that we're going to go into. this is hicks down in baltimore. plans called for multiple war branching out from a central circular building. in the best of circumstances, there might have been a river nearby so they would have bre s

breezes and fresh air going through. less right angles. all to lessen the presence of dirt. when combineded with hygienic behavior such as chamber pots, drainage ditches dug from human waste, it changed the entire concept of hygiene. although the civil war did not bring about great changes in here put ticks or diagnostics, this -- none of these pavilion hospitals existed, there nos evidence of any of them. they're all gone. these had over 1,000 hospitals in the one had 3,000 hospitals. these triumphs were for sanitary reasons, doctors came to understand that things needed to be clean.

with over a million men being treated and a mortality rate of only about 10%. the army's hospitals became the invaluable and necessary public institutions, no longer were hospitals sanctuaries only for the december opportunity and the insane. for the first time bankers and policemen, shopkeepers, they finally understand that -- with massive wars, getting well within a hospital became part of the american experience. and just some pictures of the various different hospitals. this is harwood and more pictures of the harwood and the patients inside. public hygiene became very important during the course of the war.

and these were members of the sanitary commission, i could spend a lecture talking about the sanitary commission, other than to tell you it orange natured in new york city, it was a civilian relief agency, they took the red cross and the uso and whatever it might be in today's world. it's a quasi-governmental agency and there's been great books written about it. they themselves are not necessarily doctors, but they enter deuce thtd concept of cleanliness. and finally the sanitary commission, and i put this slide up because of the home lodge for invalid soldiers they began to understand that you need to take care of the veteran, this is the big bang theory for the veterans for this period, starting back in the civil war. well, s.st wei mitchell talking about hiss remembrance of the

civil war. the general influence on the war was amiss in other ways of great service. in other words men who were very well-educated got to spread the word out to men who were less educated. and this is just a picture of surgeons and the idea is the m camaraderie that was kpesing during the course of the war. finally i want to say there were other big bang theories that happened during the war, one was nursing, i don't have the time to talk about nursing, but obviously the concept of nursing became popular during the civil war. america's physicians made no astounding breakthroughs during the civil war. it's not as if a surgeon operated on somebody's brain during the course of the war it was operated on, if you were shot in the abdomen, you were

shot in the head, you were going to die. if you got typhus and typhoid and cholera, you were probably going to die. most surgeons claimed surgeries -- soldiers recovered from illness oontds injury more from serendipity than possibility. the nation's physicians are paying a profound depth of political and organizational experience. doctors learned about the diseases and the clinical manifestations on a scale never before possible. they experienced a lifetime of practice and marching. the war created surgeons and physicians who simply had no operating experience. physicians organized ambulance corps, assembled hospital trains, served on draft boards,

medical manpower and managed vast civilian hospitals. doctors came to understand that patient well-being depended on adequate cleanliness, and natural ventilation. physicians grew to rerk nice mem health as a vital adjunct to physical health. imposed much needed camaraderie ship and addiction. this is the big bang theory. and i'll leave us with this last slide and i'll take your questions. this is s. weir mitchell. he's older, he's examining a civil war veteran at the orthopedic hospital. this is what he had to say, when

which had served -- we had built all the hospitals, organized an ambulance service that had never before been seen. what has been our reward? countless statutes commemorate in washington and elsewhere the popular heros. statues of generals are in every town. there's not a state or national monument to a physician. at gettysberg, every battle site is marked with a reporting tablet. but what are the physician who is died? nothing. and that is medicine during the civil war. so i appreciate the fact that you came out on this cold night and i look forward to your questions. thank you. [ applause ]

a. >> the civil war happened less than a decade after the crimean war. and florence nighten gale by the time the writing quite a bit about the hygiene lessons learned in that war. how much is that propagating into that? >> it had an impact on many people they did not get into. like the nurses, althea dix, floor republican nighten gale's book on nursing was throughout america. and dorthea dix -- she was important. and it probably grew more and more as nursing grew larger. sir? >> question in the same vain, what if any influence did samuel

weis's teaching have on the sanitary commission to your knowledge? >> i don't have an answer because i'm not sure that any of them knew about samuel weis, it was later than that. the type of research that he was doing that was ongoing in the 60s, they did not know anything about. so it had minimal impact and virtually none. >> in to dr. missiletchell's qu wasn't there was a field manual created in washington and wichbt he the fellow who at the philadelphia centennial in 1876, didn't he list it that there was november value to anti-sepsis and afterward wasn't his statute taken out of washington and put bark at his alma mater thomas

jefferson. >> that's my favorite topic. the answer is very simple. there was not a statue of him in washington, hiss statue is by defr son. it's on the courtyard as you walk into the medical is school. he came over in 1876 and made a very important tour of america, he was in new york city and i'm writing about it apparently in gross that he did go to the centennial celebration down in philadelphia and at the big banquet at the night that this thing was finished on a friday night, lister was here, gross was a very uppity individual, this was a very important, a more important individual than gross was, gross was a very unassuming gentleman.

and this gross praised him left and right and everybody in america knew that it was not true because just a month before gross has wrichb an article about the history of medicine and he wrote that no intelligent american would ever listen to joseph lister. so the answer is everything that you said is absolutely true. it is a fascinating story with joseph lister and samuel gross and his tour of america. i thank you for bringing that up. sir? >> thank you for your presentation. >> you are welcome. >> i am an anesthesiologist. i appreciate your wonderful photographs, or the types that you showed. there are statues to crawford long, who southerners believed discovered ether-anesthesia all over the south. not sure if they're coincidental with the civil war. certainly he is well recognized. my point is, america was known for yankee ingenuity, inventions

discoveries in every field except medicine. when you compare what was known of scientific medicine in america, 19th century, and what was happening in europe with great discoveries, foremost medical schools, centers of learning in england, france, germany, austria, america was way behind it wasn't until well into the 20th century that scientific medicine really acquired its reputation. >> yes. yes. that is an interesting phenomenon. it has been written about many times over and over again as to why that occurred. it is absolutely true what you just said. that science in america was underserved compared to how it was in europe. it is an interesting phenomenon. a subject i am interested in. i am writing something about currently. it went on for many years. america was a very raw country.

and despite the fact that it is 1876 and 100 years later and we had this centennial celebration in washington, it was still a very raw, undeveloped country. and that's just how it was. now, as far as crawford long who you mention, crawford long probably discovered anesthesia before anybody else, his statues were all after the civil war. yes, he is the south's argument against the north's -- pardon? yes. yes. so, he was an important individual. yes, doctor? >> would you comment on what if any was the influence of the french especially the napoleonic war medicine on ambulance corps and others, a little bit surprising that we had nothing although it was well known in europe at the time? >> well, the flying ambulances that the french started in the 1850s and 1860s did have an impact on the civil war in the sense that we began to have ambulances and we began to

understand that you need to take care of soldiers who were injured and wounded on the battlefield. so the impact was there. the specifics were not, it is not as if we used the specifics of their ambulances. the idea was there. specifics was not. so the answer is yes it did have an impact and would grow over the course of the 1870s and 1880s when the french became much more prominent with their flying ambulances. yes, it was there during the civil war. >> as we talk of civil war medicine, we often talk of just the north. >> yes. >> what about the south? >> well, the problem with the south, at least for me, and -- was that much of the southern medical records were destroyed in a fire. sherman marching through and everything. so they were all destroyed. there are many people who write about the south. i just don't in particular, but the south has a very rich

tradition relative to civil war medicine. as rich as what the north had. they did not have the infrastructure. much of this big bang theory that i talked about happened more in the north than it did in the south, just because of logistics and the number of men, et cetera, but the south did have a very rich tradition during the civil war. they actually had the largest civil war hospital during the war. larger than any of the northern hospitals. so, yes. it needs to be written about. it needs to be discussed, and should be presented. well, thank you very much, and i appreciate your coming. >> thank you for coming, and i encourage you to check our schedule for the remaining lectures in this series and for the entire series. thanks again.

this year c-span's local content vehicles are traveling the country exploring american history. next a look at our recent visit to wichita, kansas. you're watching american history tv, all weekend, every weekend, on c-span3. carriie nation promoted proper that business across the united states. kansas banned the sale of alcohol in 1881, but many establishments continued to sell alcohol illegally. >> she mistook fear in the bars that she entered and the patrons that were at the bar drinking, 6-foot woman walks in with an ax, throwing rocks, destroying things. you probably don't get in her

way. this is eaton place apartments, originally it was the eaton hotel. before that, it was the carrie hotel where the infamous carrie nation destroyed the bar on her crusade against prohibition here in kansas. december 26th, 1900, she entered the carrie hotel bar. she sang songs, said prayers, grabbed her ax, and began smashing the bar, destroying the bottles of booze, and damaged the lovely painting of cleopatra that hung behind the bar. it all started in 1854 when carrie was born, about 150 years ago. and about 1900 when she was in her late 40s by then, moved to medicine lodge, kansas. in medicine sonlodge, she joine

the temperance group. the nation didn't enter prohibition until much later. by 1900, she set her sights on wichita and oddly enough, she was only in wichita a month, but it was a very exciting month. wichita was presumably a high target rich area for bars and for boozers in her eyes. good population and they had a newspaper. the bar was in operation during prohibition and as most bars are in prohibition were located in basements of buildings, they usually had an exterior stair as an entrance or in this case in this building, during the renovation, several tunnels and secret pass allege ways were discovered where men could go down, go through a secret passage way and enter a bar down

in the basement. there is a picture here that has surviveds history of the bar that was destroyed by carrie. she was immediately arrested, taken down to the city jail. there are several pictures of her kneeling with her bible in front of a chair inside the jail. when she was arrested in wichita, the accounts in the eagle portrayed her at 6-feet tall, 200 pounds, she was a huge person by any standards of the day at the turn of the century. most men weren't that big at that time. but she was released almost 30 days later by habeas corpus from the supreme court. the next day, she walked from the jail across douglas and

tried to destroy two more bars. and the bartenders had a head's up, they were looking for her. they came of h. ofafter her in street with a shotgun pointed at her and subsequently decided i don't think i'll do this today and she left kansas. she entered the touring lecture circuit. she went into vaudeville and lectured there and sold souvenirs of the ax that she became famous for holding in the photograph on the wall there. in 1901, her second husband, david nation, divorced her claiming discertification because at that time she was traveling all over destroying bars. and then in 1904, she did return to wichita. she lived here for a while, she was off her bar destruction campaign. and between acty