The army still relied on male nurses, most of them quite untrained. Hospitals were mostly hastily improvised and inadequate. It is to be remembered, too, when we read of the work of the surgeons and contemplate the mortality figures, that antiseptics were unknown, the relation of dirt to infection was generally not understood, anesthesia was just coming into general use, and drugs were inadequate. It is not surprising in the light of all this that mortality from disease and wounds was far higher than from bullets, and that hospitalization was often regarded as equivalent to a death sentence. While no statistics are satisfactory and those for the Confederacy in a state of total confusion, it is a safe generalization that deaths from wounds were as numerous as deaths on the battlefield and that deaths from disease were more than twice both these combined.
Confederate statistics indicate a comparable situation.
For ease of reading on the internet I have put these subsets on separate pages.