The industry-poor Confederacy could do little to remedy such problems. The agony and misery such trips entailed was extreme, provoking demands for change. These cars had no provisions for the feeding, care, or comfort of wounded soldiers, who endured journeys lasting hours, and sometimes days, without medical attention or basic necessities. Initially, ordinary boxcars were used to haul patients. Both sides used trains to move troops and supplies to the front and transport sick and wounded men to general hospitals located throughout the North and South. The Civil War was the first railroad war. This remarkable advance in battlefield medical practices saved many lives before the war was over (Bollet 2002, p. However, both sides were able to rapidly improve the standard of care delivered to sick and wounded soldiers alike. The disorganized and grossly inadequate efforts made by both Union and Confederate medical departments at the start of the war were widely reported in newspapers of the day. Time did little to alter that point of view and, in fact, did much to reinforce it. The common perception of Civil War hospitals and surgeons was generally quite negative during the conflict. They were in short a concentration of the vilest aftereffects of battle. Field hospitals were facilities where mortally wounded men were given a few comforts and set aside to die. It was the spot where overworked doctors hurriedly examined and probed painful wounds where, all too often, surgeons used their instruments to amputate shattered and infected limbs. At the same time, however, the hospital was a site of agony and misery-the place where men with mangled limbs, bleeding bodies, torn flesh, blinded eyes, and worse, were brought together.

Only there could wounded soldiers find relief from their pain, comfort and assistance in their weakened and helpless condition, and life-saving surgery and medical care.

It was predictable that there would be contradictory views of the hospital. Yet the field hospital's staff, medicines, facilities, and surgeons were the only hope desperately wounded men had to save life and limb. To the men who survived the conflict, hospitals presented a gruesome compendium of the horrors of the war, second only to the sight of torn, bloated, lifeless bodies on the field of battle. The writings of veterans almost universally picture it as a place to be feared and avoided if at all possible. No other part of the battlefield represented such an odd mixture of hope and terror as the field hospital. Douglas Tyson and Jenny Lagergren Field Hospitals: An Overview

Civil war hospital diaries