The library’s inimitable collection of nineteenth-century American medical records provided a major component of my evidentiary base, allowing me to investigate how the Civil War veterans’ opiate addiction epidemic refracted into medical practices and thought in the late-nineteenth century U.S. My research for this project benefited immensely from a Ferenc Gyorgyey Research Grant awarded by the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library in 2018-19. In 2020-21, as a postdoctoral fellow at Penn State’s Richards Civil War Center, I am revising my book for publication. These are questions I address in my book manuscript, “Opium Slavery: Veterans and Addiction in Civil War America,” which is based on my dissertation (Binghamton University, 2020). But how did doctors react to veterans’ blame? Did they reject charges of culpability, or admit that prescriptions lay at the root of Civil War America’s opioid crisis? Did the crisis affect how doctors practiced medicine, and if so, what did any changes mean for the course of American medicine? Naturally, many addicted veterans blamed the doctors who first introduced them to opiates. Consequently, addicted veterans faced terrible outcomes, a theme I explore in a recent journal article investigating the experience of opiate addiction for veterans. Addicted veterans deserved punishment, not sympathy, according to contemporary observers. Most Americans considered addiction to be an unmanly and immoral vice. Not only was opiate addiction dangerous and unhealthy, resulting in thousands of overdose deaths between the 1860s and the early twentieth century, but the condition was also deeply stigmatized in Civil War America. Opiates are addictive, however, and doctors’ prescriptions all-too-predicably led to addiction for Civil War veterans. Civil War armies could not have functioned without opiates, which surgeons doled out widely during and after the war to ailing soldiers. Opiates were marvelous painkillers-morphine and synthetic opioids are still standard palliatives today-and the medicines were also surprisingly useful for suppressing symptoms like diarrhea and coughing. Opium pills, morphine injections, and laudanum (a blend of opium and alcohol) were some of the Civil War’s most widely used medicines. Opiates, the most common medicines in antebellum America, thus became defensive weapons in Civil War’s medical arsenal, “important to the surgeon as gunpower to the ordinance,” according to one military medical handbook. Often-times army doctors were simply civilians pressed into service by circumstance, and they fell back on fundamental therapies to mitigate sickness and suffering. Military surgeons tasked with patching up wounded soldiers and treating the sick had their jobs cut out for them. Brutal technological innovations like the Minié ball caused ghastly, agonizing wounds, and men who survived often spent the rest of their lives in chronic pain. This mass movement of bodies and pathogens resulted in extreme outbreaks of measles, smallpox, typhoid fever, and other deadly, terrifying diseases. The war mobilized millions of soldiers, hospital workers, and freedom-seekers, bringing people into contact with unfamiliar microbes, insects, and animals. Civil War (1861-65) sparked a massive epidemic of opioid addiction among those who fought and survived the bloody conflict.
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