IDEA Summary
The project I viewed at IDEA fest was a history project done by a senior pre-medical student. The title of the project was “The Calomel Catalyst: Medical Professionalization during the Civil War.” The project grabbed my attention with the use of disgusting and mortifying pictures of injured patients displayed on his poster. The poster talked about changes to medicine during the civil war such as improving hospitals and medicines that doctors gave out to patients. The poster also showed that the Civil War was connected to improvements that later happened in medicine. The war was important because many doctors were involved in it, and they were able to learn a lot because there were so many patients. The doctors were also given information from the Army on how to best treat diseases and other medical conditions during the war. Hospitals were made cleaner and were organized better, which was needed because they had been really unclean places before the war. The poster had a graph that actually showed the percent of doctors who fought for the North and for the South out of the total number of doctors in America. The conclusion of the project said that medicine was professionalized partly because of the Civil War. This happened as doctors who had benefited from learning things in the war later made improvements to medicine. They ended up making medical schools much better and also creating licensing laws to only certain doctors to practice.
Overall, I was really impressed by this project. The poster was very catchy and the presenter did a great job of explaining his project to me and was very polite. As a result of attending IDEA fest, I learned a lot about how the Civil War made such a large impact on medical advances that are even used today and helped improve hospital conditions.
