Tetanus in the Civil War

[Michael Comer]

I was reading Embattled Courage and came across a mention of a soldier dying from tetanus in a hospital. It made me wonder how common tetanus would have been during the war. I would think it was something seen fairly often by medical people at the time. So I thought I'd see if any of our medical enthusiasts, and others, might have any statistics or information about how often this disease was seen and what the mortality rate may have been from it.

[JonCW1984]

Re: Tetanus in the Civil War

Alfred Bollet's Book Civil War Medicine: Challenges and Triumphs is a good secondary source on this. Most of his research came direct from the War of Rebellion official records. Since Confederate records are incomplete for various reasons he uses Union reports. I believe there is a break down of all the various deaths by disease including tetanus in one of the appendixes.

[Becky Morgan]

Re: Tetanus in the Civil War

Some doctors would log it as "lockjaw" or...the term escapes me, but "respiratory paralysis" is part of it.

Tetanus was, of course, most common in closed puncture wounds. The emphasis on healing from the bottom of a wound, and on frequent flushing with water, may account for why there weren't more cases, even though the dubious quality of water used in irrigation doubtless contributed to other infections.