Medicine
...pment such as bandages, scraping lint, and culinary delicacies sent to army hospitals. They formed a traveling outpost that would remain with the army of the Potomac that would serve speed up the shipment of medical supplies to army hospitals. They even created and manned hospital ships that would care for men while transporting them to hospitals as far as New York. The commission even convinced doctors to write pamphlets on hygiene and sanitation that were distributed to soldiers and other field doctors. The discovery of the link between air born germs and disease had not even been discovered yet, however there were able to start a movement that helped to prevent deaths by infection of mistreated wounds. The Civil Wars necessity of better ways of caring for the wounded helped to catalyze a movement for improved medical care in the United States. However, it was the discoveries of Louis Pasteur and Joseph Lister that revolutionized the world of medicine. Louis Pasteur was a scientist whose discoveries have saved millions of lives. Pasteur greatest achievement was the discovery of disease causing microorganisms. By studying the fermentation of wine, which up to that point had been thought to merely be a chemical reaction, he discovered that microorganisms were responsible and thus showed that it was a biological process. From this discovery came his formation of Pasteurization and the elimination of the theory of spontaneous generation. Through continuing research, he discovered that by injecting small or dead amounts of a virus into the body could cause it to create immunity against it, thus he created the first vaccines. His work also brought the idea of antiseptics into being, which inspired Joseph Lister. Lister had been doing research concerning wound sepsis in the hospitals in which he worked. While the common belief was that it was caused by bad air around the wound, Lister dismissed it and focused on Pasteur’s discoveries. The idea that microbes caused disease revolutionized his thinking, causing him to use a carbolic acid solution to clean wounds. He later announced to the Britis...