The Use of Anaesthesia in Surgical Procedures

 

Unlike now, and unfortunately for the patient, anaesthesia was a rarity during battlefield procedures. This is due partly to a lack of resources, and partly to the haste with which most operations were completed. 

 

Today, we have access to many different types of anaesthesia to match each patient and their procedure, and we have doctors specifically trained in the anaesthesiology field. During the Civil War, however, the use of a chemical to relieve the pain of surgery was still a relatively new phenomenon. So, naturally, doctors had very little options during battlefield operations. If the patient was lucky, they would be administered chloroform to relieve the pain. The chloroform would be put on a cloth and held to cover the patient's nose and mouth until they fell asleep. This type of anaesthesia was used in around 80,000 operations. Although rendering a person unconscious via a dangerous chemical we avoid today seems barbaric to the modern-day spectator, the use of chloroform was revolutionary in its field, and it worked well enough to not be questioned by many doctors (5). In hospitals that didn't have access to chloroform, however, the less-fortunate patients would have to go under the knife completely awake, especially in the south (6). 

 

Today, the idea of undergoing surgery with either minimal (and dangerous) anaesthesia, like chloroform, or undergoing surgery with no anaesthesia at all is unheard of. This is because American medicine has been constantly evolving since 1865, and we have been able to discover so much more about anaesthesia that we even have an entire medical field dedicated to it. Although the brutality in the lack of proper anaesthesia led to many surgical patients during the Civil War having a horrific experience, this brutality is what forced and catalyzed a shift towards progression and reform in this field.