Immigrants also began seeing the fast-growing nation as a land of opportunity and began coming here in record numbers.įor many years Southern lawmakers had blocked the passage of land-grant legislation. With these doors of opportunity open, the United States experienced rapid economic growth. The Civil War paved the way for Americans to live, learn and move about in ways that had seemed all but inconceivable just a few years earlier. We prize America as a land of opportunity. Today's modern hospital is a direct descendant of these first medical centers.Ģ. The ambulance and nurses' corps became fixtures, with the Civil War's most famous nurse, Clara Barton, going on to establish the American Red Cross. After the war, hospitals adapted from the battlefront model cropped up all over the country. Women flocked to serve these hospitals as nurses.īefore the war, most people received health care at home. The idea was to collect wounded soldiers from the field, take them to a dressing station and then transport them to the field hospital.ĭoctors laid out the hospitals as camps divided into well-defined wards for specific activities such as surgery and convalescence. The nation's first ambulance corps, organized to rush wounded soldiers to battlefront hospitals and using wagons developed and deployed for that purpose, was created during the Civil War. Four years later, legions of field-tested doctors, well-versed in anatomy, anesthesia and surgical practice, were poised to make great medical leaps. Each side entered the war with puny squads of physicians trained by textbook, if at all. The Civil War began during medieval medicine's last gasp and ended at the dawn of modern medicine. Here are eight ways the Civil War indelibly changed us and how we live: Other vestiges have weakened with the passage of time but are no less legacies of the four horrific, heroic years that shaped us as one nation. Some ring strong: of course the end of slavery, perhaps the worst disgrace in the nation's history. An ambulance crew demonstrates the removal of wounded soldiers from the field during the Civil War.Įn español | Echoes of the nation’s greatest fight - the Civil War - still reverberate from coast to coast.