The American Civil War Produced Hundreds of Thousands of Morphine Addicts
The American Civil War was the country’s bloodiest, with casualties exceeding the total casualties of all other US wars, combined. About 10 percent of all Northern males, and about 30 percent of all Southern males, are thought to have perished in the conflict. Modern estimates put the war’s fatalities at between 785,000 to 1 million deaths, the latter figure representing 3.2% of total US population at the time. If extrapolated to America’s 2018 population estimates, it would be the equivalent of about 10,500,000 deaths.
It was one of the first major “modern” wars, and one in which advances in weaponry outpaced advances in battlefield tactics. The result was high casualties and horrific injuries that confronted the armies’ physicians with unprecedented challenges. The standard of medical care was abysmally low by modern standards and had not advanced much beyond that of the Napoleonic era, half a century earlier.
The sole exception was the field of pain management. Civil War physicians might not have known about antiseptic practices to prevent infections. However, thanks to the recent invention of the hypodermic needle, coupled with the discovery of morphine decades earlier, they could at least do something to ease the pain of wounded soldiers. And when hypodermic needles and morphine were unavailable, opium pills were in plentiful supply – at least in Union hospitals.
So soldiers were often dosed with massive amounts of morphine or opium to deaden the pain of amputations, other surgeries, and various ailments. There were plenty of wartime accounts highlighting that liberality in dispensing drugs. One Union doctor diagnosed wounded soldiers from horseback, and if any needed morphine, the doctor would pour a dose on his hand, and have the soldier lick it. On the Confederate side, one Rebel doctor was known for giving any patient a plug of opium, depending on whether or not he was constipated.
The potential for addiction was known, but the risk was deemed acceptable and was a lesser evil that could be dealt with later. “Later” came when the soldiers were discharged from the hospitals, and it is estimated that over 400,000 Civil War became morphine addicts because of their wartime experiences. The term “Soldier’s Disease” was coined to describe that addiction. Many addicts were readily identifiable by a small bag dangling from a leather thong around their neck, containing morphine tablets and a hypodermic needle.
