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The home of one of Waco’s first doctors is the showcase, through January, of a unique display of historic medical instruments and nostrums used to fight disease and injury in the Civil War era.

“Early Medicine of the 19th Century,” an exhibit presented at McCulloch House, 407 Columbus Ave., is curated by Watson Arnold and Robert Corwin, local physicians who have made a hobby of collecting vintage implements and accoutrements of their profession.

The exhibit, sponsored by the Historic Waco Foundation, makes use of the front parlor of McCulloch House, which was once the home of Dr. Josiah Caldwell (d. 1896), one of the 10 original founders of the Waco Medical Association.

The property passed through many hands before it was purchased by Caldwell and his wife, Maria, on Aug. 27, 1866, for $500. The Caldwells built the one-story structure, (now the east wing of the residence) and lived there about five years. On Jan. 3, 1871, they sold the property to Champe Carter McCulloch (a two-term Waco mayor) and his wife, Emma Bassett McCulloch, for $6,000 in gold.

Curators Watson and Corwin, speaking at the public reception inaugurating the exhibit, noted that the conditions in which doctors and physicians worked were primitive and downright barbaric when compared to today’s hygienic hospitals. The first mobile Army-surgical hospital units, they observed, were nothing more than wagons toting two wooden sawhorses and an old door to use as an operating table in the field.

The Civil War, Arnold said, saw an explosion in the surgeon’s art; each side employed be- tween 10,000 to 15,000 medical professionals. The use of new anesthetics — chloroform and ether — made the gruesome surgery of the day more tolerable. Because the gases were flammable (candles and fireplaces could set off an explosion), surgeries had to be moved outside for the ventilation.

Each gas had its good and bad points, Arnold said. With chloroform, the patient goes “out” quickly but has greater difficulty being roused from the unconscious state. With ether, the patient goes down more slowly but can react with great agitation when lightly sedated or often wakes up extremely nauseated. Battlefield surgeons needed a team of strong men to hold down such patients while the using their tools (hence the nickname “sawbones”) to amputate limbs shattered by Minié balls, the ammunition of the day.

Although surgeons used ether and chloroform routinely, surgery was performed with unwashed hands and unclean instruments. Antiseptic surgery would not become standard practice until after the war, Corwin said. Despite these daunting odds, about 75 percent of those operated upon survived their injuries, according to a postwar publication of the U.S. Surgeon General’s office.

Some military doctors who had a notion about the then-novel idea of “germ theory,” Corwin said, tried to suggest more hygenic practices. Without the use of modern antibiotics to combat infection, disease was rampant in the camps.

Frontier doctors and their military counterparts in the 19th century had only a basic concept of physiology and limited knowledge of vaccinations and pharmacology, Corwin said. Some still worked under the 2,000-year-old theory that diseases were caused by an imbalance in the “bodily humors” — black bile, yellow bile, phlegm and blood. The basic strategies of the era called for bleeding, blistering or purging these humors from the body when necessary. Pain was treated with the highly addictive substances morphine and laudanum.

But by the end of the century, because the advances during by the Civil War, frontier doctors had the knowledge and tools to overcome pain and infections in their patients.

The 19th-century medical exhibit is open from 2 to 5 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays, through the end of January, at the McCulloch House, 407 Columbus Ave. Special tours can be arranged by calling 753-5166. Admission costs $3 per person, but children ages 12 and younger are admitted free.

Additional Sources: Early Homes of Waco and People Who Lived in Them, by Lavonia Jenkins Barnes; Recollections of a Rebel Surgeon, by F. E. Daniel M.D. (1901); Historic Waco Foundation.