Blood and Germs: The Civil War Battle against Wounds and Disease by Gail Jarrow (review)

Jarrow, Gail Blood and Germs: The Civil War Battle against Wounds and Disease. Calkins Creek, 2020 [176p] illus. with photographs Trade ed. ISBN 9781684371761 $18.99 Reviewed from digital galleys R Gr. 5-8

Of the more than 600,000 soldiers who died in the Civil War, around 400,000 succumbed to disease, and here Jarrow relates the mind-boggling number of paths to the grave. Lax enlistment exams, a nursing profession in its often disdained infancy, hasty recruitment of poorly trained doctors, and a prevailing theory on disease that focused on "miasma" rather than microbes set the grim stage for this particular conflict, and battlefield conditions—crowding, poor sanitation, malnutrition, slow transport of the wounded—were stock players. Jarrow focuses primarily on Union soldiers, since the bulk of Confederate medical records were destroyed in a Richmond fire, but she often redresses the gap with doctors' case notes (and their accompanying photo illustrations) of Southern soldiers. Although the overall medical tale is necessarily appalling, she also indicates areas in which medical knowledge and practice advanced, from improved and expanded ambulance service and nursing, to enhanced hospital ventilation which, although introduced to clear mythical "miasma," often helped stop the spread of disease. Clearly captioned period photos give human faces to the statistics and helpfully comment on the circumstances in which the photos were taken. A timeline, glossary, author's note, lists of resources and citations, bibliography, and index are included.