“Had 2010 medicine been available for our civil war, the total deaths would have been somewhere under 150,000 rather than the actual 640,000.”
I don’t know what the actual numbers would have been, but I do know that sickness killed a hell of a lot of those 640,000 troops.
I don't have the numbers immediately available either, but it was something over 2/3, I believe.
How many troops have we lost to sickness in Iraq and Afghanistan? Darn few. Which is kind of my point. Modern medicine is even better at preventing deaths from typhus or dysentery than from wounds.
To die in the military today, you just about have to get shot in the head or the heart, or thoroughly blown up.