Instead, they were quickly rinsed and reused. Medical instruments were not sterilized between surgeries. At most, a bucket of water would be thrown over the operating table to clear off the previous patient’s blood. But doctors in Civil War field hospitals had no such understanding-and they made little effort to prepare their makeshift surgical areas before the next badly wounded soldier was carried in. We take it for granted today that doctors, nurses, and other medical practitioners know to scrub thoroughly and don gloves, masks, and gowns before providing critical care in emergency situations. And by the end of the war, they’d found ways to produce opium and other common medicines of the day without having to run the blockades to get them. They employed grafting processes of yet others. No, these inventive souls tried cross-pollinating various species. But the Southerners didn’t only pick existing plants, dry them, grind them to powder, and put them in their tea. Herbal remedies were nothing new, mind you-people had been using medicinal plants to treat ailments and injuries for centuries. Southerners created medical laboratories where experimentation with all sorts of indigenous plants, barks, leaves, and roots was done. In the case of the South, supply lines were blockaded, so southerners had to find ways to go around or slip through the blockades-or they did without. And even for those that had been, wartime meant that supplies were often low, or they might take longer to reach their destination. In the 1860s, many of our modern medical conveniences hadn’t yet been invented. Today, we take it for granted that we can drive to the nearest drug store and pick up over-the-counter pain medications for a headache, antibiotics for an infection, or pretty much any other supplies we might need.
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