The American Civil War is almost as much a story of disease as it is one of armies and battles. The numbers are staggering. Current scholarship puts the total deaths in the war at more than 750,000. Over twice as many soldiers died from disease as from battlefield injuries. Huge numbers of troops suffered illnesses but survived.
At the start of the war, both sides faced a shortage of a very important medicine: quinine. Each side had to deal with that shortage in a very