Medicine on the battlefield has always been inspired by urgency and improvisation, and the American Civil War highlights just how much human courage contributed to advancements.

The Civil War might seem to today's physicians like a quaint anachronism, irrelevant to modern concerns, a blurred panorama of drunken surgeons wiping their scalpels on blood-soaked aprons and ...

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. The staff of the National Museum of Civil War Medicine in Frederick regularly tells visitors of the war's many medical ...

Most Civil War histories evoke the bravura of 19th century military skill, of masses of men moving across open fields to face other orderly masses of men and commence killing each other. Few books ...

My grandfather told me that when he was a boy, he would steal glances at a Civil War veteran sitting in church every Sunday. The man had a gaping hole in his forehead, a gruesome reminder of the ...

Ch. 1. American medicine in the 1850s -- Ch. 2. Creating Confederate medicine -- Ch. 3. Lincoln finds a Surgeon General -- Ch. 4. Maggots and minié balls -- Ch. 5. The introduction of women nurses -- ...