How the living carried the dead

Two-thirds of Civil War deaths came from disease, not bullets. Camp diarrhea killed more men than Minie balls. Surgeons operated without anesthesia on tables made of fence planks, using saws meant for timber. The medical catastrophe of 1861–1865 was not a side effect of war—it was the war''s central experience for most soldiers, and this book places that suffering at the narrative core rather than...