One of the more profound and unforgettable displays at the Atlanta History Center is an array of the typical civil war field surgeon’s tools. One look at that and you wonder how anyone survived being treated for their wounds. Crude saws and other tools, and then to think they did not have developed germ theory and sterilization techniques. Eeew...
I have visited re-enactment field hospitals for both the American revolution (Yorktown) and the Civil war (Ghettysburg).
By all accounts the Revolution, 85 years earlier, had better battlefield care.
Go Figure!
I saw such a kit at the Museum and Library of Confederate History, Greenville, SC. It gave me the willies, and I was combat field medic in Vietnam.
I heard a story that in the South, during the Civil War, there was a shortage of silk for sutures, so they used hair from horses tails. The hair was stiff, so to make it more flexible they boiled it. Then they noticed that the soldiers with boiled horse-hair sutures suffered from infections at a much lower rate than patients with silk sutures. That's the way I heard it anyway...
Emergency Medical techniques and treatment grew by leaps and bounds during the Civil War, due to doctors having to learn from earnest mistakes. Same thing with WW I. A sad truth.