Bleeding Blue and Gray

The Revolutionary War Battle of York involved 29,000 American, French, and British soldiers; contrast this with the Battle of Gettysburg, a single battle that involved 160,000 North and South soldiers on the field. The total number of deaths between 1861 and 1865 was roughly equal to casualties sustained in the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, the Mexican War, the Spanish-American War, World Wars I and II, and the Korean War combined, with a death rate six times that of World War II. The state of medicine in the United States at the outbreak of the Civil War had progressed little since the Revolutionary War eighty-five years earlier. The medicine of the 1860s had hardly moved past the bleeding and purging that had contributed to Washington’s death. <a href="https://medium.com/lessons-from-history/bleeding-blue-and-gray-cb1ed612bd36">Read More</a>