Wounded Civil War soldiers and their fight to cope with
disabling battlefield injuries will be featured in the National Library of
Medicine exhibit at the West Virginia School of Osteopathic Medicine in
Lewisburg.
"Life and Limb: The Toll of the Civil War" will explore the
experiences of disabled Civil War veterans who were forced to sacrifice their
limbs in order to save their lives. The exhibit at the campus library will be
on display through March 23.
Mary Essig, WVSOM library director, said the exhibit focuses
on the stories of disabled veterans rather than the surgeons, physicians and
nurses whose stories are richly documented from that time.
"This is more than just the general history of Civil War and
Civil War medicine," she said. "There's a lot of interest in that history, but
the contribution of disabled veterans often gets forgotten."
The Life and Limb exhibit will offer a glimpse into the medical
field between 1861 and 1865 from common surgeries to medical instruments to the
creation of an "Invalid Corps" in 1863. According to the NLM, about 60,000
surgeries during the war were amputations. Many times the surgeries were
completed without anesthesia and in some cases left patients with painful sensations
in the severed nerves.
The practice of medicine has certainly evolved in the past
150 years, but perhaps not as much as some might think.
"For our medical students, this is part of the history of
medicine and how things developed," Essig said. "It's interesting to see the
surgical implements of the past and see how far we've come, but yet how similar
some of them are to what we still use today."
Exhibit hours are 8 a.m. to 10 p.m., Monday through
Thursday; 8 a.m. to 6 p.m., Friday; 12 to 6 p.m., Saturday; and 2 to 10 p.m.,
Sunday.
For
information about the exhibit, contact the library at 304-647-6261.
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