Amid all the revisionist history being peddled these days as we have just marked the 150th anniversary of the Civil War, I just learned something that puts a whole new perspective on that bloody war.
It turns out that two-thirds of the deaths, North and South, were the result of disease, rather than battlefield casualties. Some 414,000 died not from the crude methods of war-fighting in the 19th Century but rather due to dysentery, pneumonia, malaria and measles. Other key factors were a lack of medical supplies, military hospitals located far from battlefields, and doctors and nurses who were not trained to handle this mix of ailments.
How many of you out there knew that?