While saying something “costs an arm and a leg” today can applied to anything expensive, some Union soldiers returning from the Civil War were given a much more precise definition.
“If you were an amputee and you wanted a prosthetic, there was a federal government program that was set up and soldiers would receive vouchers,” said Jon E. Willen, speaking to a group of visitors to the National Museum of Civil War Medicine in downtown Frederick on Sunday. “It was $50 for an arm and $75 for a leg.”
Dressed in the replica garb of a Confederate Army surgeon, Willen was one of several members of the Pennsylvania-based Blue and Gray Hospital Association, a Civil War living history organization specifically dedicated to preserving and sharing the history of Civil War-era medicine. Formed in 2012, the association has come to the museum in Frederick about three times a year for the last few years to host special presentations on period medical care for visitors from all over, said Mark Quattrock, one of the association’s founders.
“I heard about the museum when they were holding one of their historical interpretations workshops and I came down and just fell in love with it,” Quattrock said of the museum at 48 East Patrick Street. “It’s been my home away from home ever since.”
While the association members were wearing Confederate Army uniforms and displaying some of that army’s unique medical tools on Sunday, about a month ago the same group visited the museum wearing Union costumes and carrying medical equipment typically supplied to that army.
For their part, the museum was all too happy to host Quattrock and his fellow re-enactors as often as they are able to make it, said David Price, the museum’s executive director.
“We’re very thankful that we have these guys because they’re dedicated and serious and just as passionate about this topic as we are,” Price said as he walked through the special presentation set up in the Delaplaine Randall Conference Room on the museum’s second floor.
Visitors streamed in and out throughout the day to chat with the re-enactors and ask questions about the various tools and historical objects on display, including the various items needed to measure ingredients, press and make pills at the time, as well as various glass containers of the type used to carry anesthetics.
The very inclusion of anesthetics in the line up came as a surprise for some of the visitors, including Patricia Dalton Byrne, who said she wasn’t aware that such medicines were available during the first half of the 1860s when the conflict took place.
While ether was being used by surgeons as an anesthetic even before the war, the U.S. Civil War was the first major world conflict in which the use of anesthetics became widespread among army surgeons, Quattrock said. In fact, the specific dangers of setting up dressing stations and infirmaries just a few hundred feet back from the battlefield dictated to some extent which drugs were used.
“For instance, one of the biggest drawbacks to ether was that it was highly-combustible,” Quattrock said, explaining that many operations were done under candlelight and close to active gunfire. “… And they found that chloroform was just a much more effective agent, as well.”
Having seen examples of an amputation saw and another sawing device that was used to “resection” an injured soldier’s limb, Byrne said she was glad to know the doctors at the time at access to some pain-numbing medicine.
Byrne and her husband, Patrick Byrne, who recently moved to Middletown, decided to visit the museum Sunday when another couple they are friends with, Phillip Pierce and his wife Lauretta Grau, came to visit from out of state. Because both Patrick Byrne and Pierce studied medicine together in the 1970s, a museum dedicated to medical history seemed like a natural fit.
“We’re medical people, so this was very high on the list of things to do,” Grau said with a laugh.
In a happy coincidence, Pierce and Willen learned that they, too, had both worked at the Washington, D.C. VA Medical Center in 1975 and had both pursued careers in studying infectious diseases, coming into contact with many of the same colleagues and co-workers.
If nothing else, Pierce said he came away from Sunday’s event with a much deeper appreciation for the tools and equipment he works with today compared to what his forebears in medicine had to work with.
“It’s a wonderful way to ground us with the progress we’ve made in medicine over time,” Pierce said with a smile. “There was a statement made during the presentation saying, for example, [Civil War surgeons] couldn’t do abdominal surgery, meaning abdominal wounds had a very high mortality rate … So you can see why life expectancy has shot up so far in the years since, I think by probably 30 to 40 years, thanks to advancements.”