The use of quinine during the Civil War.

  • Churchman, John W. (John Woolman), 1877-1937.
Date:
[1906]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The use of quinine during the Civil War. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University.

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    June, 1906.] THE USE OF QUININE DURING THE CIVIL WAR.1 By John W. Churchman, M. D., Late Clinical Assistant, Johns Iloplins Hospital. If coffee, cathartics, and ammunitions were the sinews of [175] the Civil War—arranged in order of importance—quinine was the staple that would have been, after these three and perhaps after whiskey, most missed. In the early days of the century, when surgery was still so largely a question of fractures and emergencies, and when medicine was only beginning to know the interest and advance which were to come with applied microscopy and chemistry and physics, quinine was arousing a lively interest indeed. And it was an interest destined to [1761 continue on through its seventh and eighth decades. From that pride and scandal of medicine—the Surgeon General's catalogue—one may obtain a fair idea of the atten- tion this drug was demanding in the days when the Missouri Compromise and the policy of the Free Soilers, and the Omnibus Bill were the vital things, and Henry Clay and Dred Scott and John Brown the names in the headlines. The liter- ature of the subject rapidly took on dimensions. Articles appeared on almost every conceivable phase of the question. Inaugural theses and ephemeral articles were written on the pharmaceutical preparation of the drug, on the procedure of extraction, on its detection in the urine, on quantitative and qualitative chemical analysis, on the solubility of its salts. Elaborate dissertations appeared labeled, On the Sulphate of Quinine. Historical studies were published, the beautiful 1 Read before the Johns Hopkins Hospital Historical Club, May 8, 1905. (1)