Civil War

“There is no denying how important the clinics, laboratories, and model of European science was for the development of American medical education and professionalization in the post-Civil War period. But the medical developments during the Civil War established patterns, attitudes, ideas about disease, and above all a new foundation for the medical sciences. The way medicine was structured during the war, in fact, prepared physicians, the government, and the public for a social transformation in medicine. Very simply the medicine of 1860 was vastly different from the medicine of 1863, and the medicine of 1866 was vastly different again” (Devine, 137; cf. Rutkow, 310ff.).