Today in 1861, the American Civil War began when Confederate forces fired upon Fort Sumter in South Carolina. With two locations in Maryland, the National Museum of Civil War Medicine tells the story of “the dedication, innovation and devotion of Civil War surgeons and medical support staff on both sides of the conflict…Their tenacity and compassion to heal stemmed a death rate that could have easily been twice the 620,000.” There are exhibits on medical education, recruitment, camp life, evacuation of the wounded, field dressing stations and hospitals, embalming and comparisons to today’s modern technologies. On a side note, my mom works with a guy obsessed with this stuff. He has pictures of Civil War people next to his computer (no family or significant other in his life?) and his hair nearly resembles that of Ambrose Burnside.
National Museum of Civil War Medicine, Maryland
