DISEASE, injury and sickness
Physicians recognized several categories of indirect inflammations. Dr. C. Keith Wilbur, in his 1998 edition of "Civil War Medicine," lists miasmatic, non-miasmatic, and unclassified as three major categories.
Typhus and typhoid fever were classified as miasmatic diseases. Such diseases were thought to originate from bad air, filth and decaying animal and plant matter. Patients of both diseases exhibited a continued fever as opposed to intermittent fevers, as with malaria, or eruptive fevers, as with smallpox or variola. These were the three fevers of miasmatic diseases taught in the medical schools of the day.
Poor sanitation, typhoid fever and typhus were synonymous during the Civil War. According to military records, typhoid took the lives of 29,336 Union soldiers. This is approximately 25 percent of all deaths caused by disease. The South suffered also. For every Confederate soldier killed in battle, three died from disease.
Typhoid is caused by different species of salmonella bacteria in contaminated water and is also carried by flies from privies and latrines to the food soldiers ingested. Typhus is caused by microorganisms called rickettsia, carried by body lice. Unsanitary conditions allow body lice to survive. Because of the symptoms, often the diseases were confused by physicians.
The symptoms of typhoid fever were continued fever, perhaps pink skin-spots on the upper abdomen, enlarged spleen, diarrhea, listlessness and sometimes death. Before antibiotics, 12 percent to 16 percent of patients died.
Typhus begins with chills, fever, rash, convulsions, delirium and perhaps death. After World War I, 30 million cases were reported in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. Official Union records reported 850 deaths from 2,501 diagnosed cases of typhus. But the records also list 11,898 cases of continued fever.
Undoubtedly, many were caused by salmonella and/or rickettsia. Both were recognized as camp fevers, as they were common among large numbers of men packed together in camp without proper sanitation and good personal hygiene.
There actually was a Typhoid Mary. She was a cook in New York City in the early 1900s, and a carrier of salmonella responsible for at least 10 outbreaks of the disease.
Typhoid was treated with the purgative calomel, quinine, opium pills for pain and diarrhea, cold compresses for fever, blistering, whiskey if the patient collapsed, and oral turpentine.
Typhus was treated with Dover's powders to sweat the disease out, mustard plasters, and many of the same medicines used to treat typhoid fever. Body-lice bite and warmed lard was applied to lessen itching. Wet tobacco, ammonia, and the juice of wild onions were also utilized.
The residents of Washington City, or D.C., were not immune to the ravages of typhoid fever. The Washington Canal that connected the Capitol with the Potomac River was an open sewer during the Civil War. Residents of Washington suffered from typhoid, as did soldiers. Willie Lincoln, the President's 11-year-old son, died in February of 1862 from typhoid fever. This open sewer is believed to have been the breeding place of typhoid. It was filled in during the early 1880s. Today, Constitution Avenue runs over much of its bed.
Physicians, nurses, and officers really did not have a cure for these diseases, but they did know that clean air and clothing, bathing and proper sanitation could decrease the incidence of sickness.
TED MAGUDER is the division dean of natural sciences and mathematics on the Woodbridge campus of Northern Virginia Community College and a volunteer with the National Park Service at Manassas National Battlefield Park. Send e-mail to his attention at
Email: gwoolf@freelancestar.com.