Civil War Pharmacy Summary

drug supply and provision in the Confederate Army, while Smith’s book details the history of the U.S. government laboratories in Philadelphia and Astoria, New York. Next came historian Bruce A. Evans, who studied drug therapies during the war in his book, A Primer of Civil War Medicine. Evans’ presents in his argument in a unique and interesting way by presenting “the essentials of medical therapeutics as they would have been summarized by a reasonably well trained mainstream physician during the years of the War Between the States.” A couple of years later came the outstanding, objective, and thoroughly researched essay from Guy Hasegawa, who surveyed the broad scope of pharmaceutical care in both the North and the South. Yet, regardless …show more content…
Franke’s dissertation focuses only on Confederate pharmacies; Smith focuses on Union laboratories; Evans’ book offers little historical analysis and doesn’t place pharmaceutical care in a larger context of the time, despite its interesting and unique point of view; and Hasegawa’s essay serves as a summary of past work and an outline for future work. Michael A. Flannery’s book, Civil War Pharmacy, attempts to escape and outperform the previous historical narratives by assessing the evolution of pharmacy during the war and describing how both the Union and the Confederacy practiced pharmacy. He carefully examines the roles of medical purveyors and hospital stewards, and compares the influence women had on the pharmacy in both the North and the …show more content…
It has allowed scholars to interpret and debate the past with precision and sophistication unlike any other field in history. But with these constant debates comes repetition and the clear division of Civil War medical historians: those who believe that medicine during the war was primitive and barbaric or those who believe the medicine displayed the time period and greatly improved as the war continued. There are a small number of outliers like Brain Craig Miller, Shauna Devine, and Margaret Humphreys, who dare to argue something different but they are unknown historians and their voices are rarely heard. It is time for the field to spread its arms and give the new arguments an opportunity to be debated, but chances of this occurring is slim due to the huge influence of the media. Producers, directors, and writers seek to thrill audiences with bloody, gory, inhumane, and unrealistic surgeries and hospitals during the Civil War thus driving the divide among historians and silencing the outliers. It is time for medical historians to stand up and revitalize the subject field, just like the doctors, orderlies and nurses did 155 years ago when shots first rang out in the harbor of Charleston, South