Confederate Cures in the Civil War

April 11, 2020 at 12:14 am (Civil War, Remedies and Medicine)
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In the Civil War, the death rate from contagious diseases and illnesses were very high. “In the Federal armies, sickness and disease accounted for 7 of every 10 deaths. One authority has estimated that among the Confederates three men perished from disease for every man killed in battle. Small wonder that a Civil War soldier once wrote his family from camp: “It scares a man to death to get sick down here.” – The Civil War

In the Summer of 1862 the Berrien Minute Men, 29th GA Regiment, stationed at Causton’s Bluff and Battery Lawton would suffer with malaria, fever, measles, mumps, dysentery, tonsillitis, wounds, typhus, pneumonia, tuberculosis, syphilis, hepatitis, and rheumatism. The heat, mosquitoes, fleas and sandflies just made the men all the more uncomfortable. All of the stations of the Berrien Minute Men on the Georgia coast were disease ridden. After visiting Battery Lawton on June 22, 1862, Captain George A. Mercer wrote, “Fort Jackson, and the adjacent batteries, are located in low swampy fields, where the insects are terrible, the air close and fetid and full of miasma and death.” The “miasma” was actually mosquito-borne transmission of diseases like yellow fever or malaria, but the conventional wisdom at the time was that all diseases were carried by vapors, which were believed to be especially prevalent in coastal marshy areas.  Given the state of medical knowledge in the 1860s, Regimental Surgeon, William P. Clower, had little if any effective treatments for such contagious diseases. (Surgeon Clower’s brother, John T. Clower, would later practice medicine in Ray’s Mill, now Ray City, GA).  Wiregrass Georgians had always depended more on home remedies, patent medicines and faith than doctors.

On June 12, 1862, a concerned citizen advised Confederate soldiers via a newspaper article to treat camp illnesses themselves and not to trust their health to physicians. Some of the “cures” seem worse than the disease.  In discussing the recipes for tinctures and enemas, the advise is, “If the pepper is too exciting for delicate patients, leave it out…   

On the treatment snake bite, the reference to Hog Artichoke has a trivial connection to the Berrien Minute Men; Colonel William Spencer Rockwell, who enlisted the Berrien Minute Men in the C.S.A., was perhaps the leading horticultural authority on Hog Artichoke in the State of Georgia.

 

Savannah Morning News
June 12, 1862

“[From the Columbus Enquirer.]
Every Soldier his own Physician.
Editor Enquirer:—Horrified at the rapidity with which our soldiers die in camp, we are tempted to give them the following recipes, the result of some experience, in hopes that some may be saved by using remedies simple, safe, and generally sure cures:
TO PREVENT SICKNESS.—Have a Jug of salted vinegar, seasoned with pepper, and take a mouthful just before going to bed. The salt and vinegar make a near approach to the digestive gastric Juice of the stomach, and are besides antidotes to many of the vegetable and miasmatic poisons.
FOR PNEUMONIA, COLDS AND COUGHS.—Take half a cup or less of the salted pepper vinegar, fill the cup nearly full of warm water, and then stir in a raw well-beaten egg slowly. Taken mouthful every 15 or 20 minutes; in the intervals slowly suck on a piece of alum. If the attack is violent, dip a cloth in hot salted pepper vinegar and apply it round the throat, cover with dry clothes to get up a steam, and do the same to the chest.
FOR CHILLS.—Put a tablespoonful of salted pepper vinegar in a cup of warm water, go to bed and drink; In two hours drink a cup of strong water-willow bark tea; in two hours more another tablespoonful of the vinegar and warm water, and so on, alternating, until the fever is broken up. After sweating, and before going into the out door air, the body ought always to be wiped off with a cloth dipped in cold water. Dogwood will do if water-willow cannot be obtained
FOR MEASLES.—Put a small piece of yeast in a tumbler of warm sweetened water, let it draw, and drink a mouthful every 15 or 30 minutes, and drink plentifully of cold or hot catnip, balsam, horehound, or alder tea, and use in place of oil or salts, one table spoonful molasses, one teaspoonful lard, and one teaspoonful salted pepper vinegar, melted together and taken warm. Take once a day, if necessary— keep out of the wet and out-door air.
FOR DIARRHOEA.— A teaspoonful of the salted pepper vinegar every one or two hours. Take a teaspoonful of the yellow puffs that grow round oak twigs, powdered fine; take twice a day in one tablespoonful of brandy, wine or cordial. If these yellow puffs can not be found, suck frequently on a piece of alum. The quantity of alum depends upon the severity of the attack; take slowly and little at a time.
FOR CAMP FEVERS.—One tablespoonful of salted pepper vinegar, slightly seasoned, and put into a cup of warm water—drink freely and often, from 4 to 8 cupfuls a day, with fever or without fever. Pour a cupful more or less of the salted pepper vinegar into cold water, and keep the body, particularly the stomach and head, well bathed with a cloth dipped in it. Give enemas of cold water, and for oil use a tablespoonful molasses, a teaspoonful lard, and a teaspoonful pepper vinegar, melted together and taken warm. If the pepper is too exciting for delicate patients, leave it out of the drinks and bathings, and use simply the salt and vinegar in water, and very little salt.
ANTIDOTE FOR DRUNKENESS: FOR THE BENEFIT OF OFFICERS —One cup of strong black Coffee, with out milk or sugar, and twenty drops of Laudanum. Repent the dose if necessary. Or take one teaspoonful of Tincture Lobelia In a tumbler of milk; if taken every ten or fifteen minutes it will act us an emetic: taken in longer intervals, say thirty minutes, it will act as an antidote. The Yankees declared that poisoned liquor was put on the counters in Newbern to poison their soldiers. Nobody doubts the liquor being poisoned, but it was made of poison to sell to our own Southern boys; and it is horrifying to think of the liquors now being made down in cellars, of “sulfuric acid, strychnine, buckeye, tobacco leaves, coloring matter and rain water.” For this poisoned liquor, the best antidote is an emetic, say lobelia and warm salt and water, and then drink freely of sugared vinegar water.
FOR SNAKE BITES —The best thing is one teaspoonful of Lobelia and ten drops of Ammonia, taken every few minutes, and a bottle filled with Lobelia and Ammonia, stopped with the palm of the hand and warmed in a panful of hot water; then apply the bottle to the bite, and it will draw out and antidote the poison. Either of these, Lobelia or Ammonia, will answer without the other. Tobacco, or Nightshade, or Kurtle Burr, or Deer Tongue, (a rough-leafed herb, in flower and appearance like to hog artichoke) stowed in milk; drink the milk, using the rest as a poultice. The last is an Indian remedy, and will cure in the agonies of death.
FOR CHICKEN CHOLERA, NOW DEVASTATING FOWLDOM.—Put one or two Jimpston or Jamestown weed leaves, properly called Stramonium, into the water trough every day—fresh leaves and fresh water. This is one of the triumphs of Homeopathy, for we were just from a perusal of one of their works, and finding that the chickens died and made no signs of sickness, except holding the head down, we concluded the head must be the seat of the plague, and reading that stramonium affected the brain with mania and stupor, we tried it, and have not lost a chicken since the using.
If other papers will copy these recipes, they will save many lives, now sacrificed to the negligence of salaried physicians The Eastern monarch’s plan ought to be adopted, to strike off a certain percent of a Doctor’s salary every time he loses a patient— that would soon stop the feast of Death! X.

Confederate medicine: cures for soldiers in the regimental camps.

Confederate medicine: cures for soldiers in the regimental camps.

 

 

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