With a death toll estimated somewhere between 600k and 750k, the American Civil War was without a doubt the bloodiest conflict in U.S. history. But even the soldiers who made it out alive didn’t always do so without sustaining serious injuries.
On its Flickr page, the US National Library of Medicine has shared a handful of portraits that depict the war-torn bodies of soldiers who fought through the war.
According to the US National Library of Medicine, roughly 3/4th of all surgeries performed during the Civil War were amputations.
From missing fingers and hands to completely amputated legs, the portraits show solemn soldiers posing with what remains of their bodies. Some of the portraits were captured by hospitals, as a way of showing how their surgical procedures had turned out; others were commissioned by the soldiers themselves as a memorabilia of sorts.
Below is a collection of some of the less graphic portraits from the library’s archives:
If you’d like to see more of these portraits, including some of the more graphic ones we couldn’t include here, head over to the US National Library of Medicine’s Flickr page and take a closer look.
(via Hyperallergic)
Image credits: Photographs courtesy of the US National Library of Medicine
Started out doing photography at the age of 6 using an uncle's old 1940 kodak brownie box camera. At 15 years of age, I decided to buy my very own 1975 Praktica SLR camera. I now shoot with a Nikon D850. I do unpaid TFP and commercial paid work.