Union prisoners at Andersonville suffer greatly from…

Union prisoners at Andersonville suffer greatly from hunger, exposure and disease during the summer of 1864.

Within seven months, about a third of them die from what is diagnosed as dysentery and scurvy and are buried in mass graves, the standard practice by Confederate prison authorities at Andersonville and in the North by Union forces, which experience much the same death rate of Confederate prisoners.

In 1864, the Confederate Surgeon General asks Joseph Jones, an expert on infectious disease, to investigate the high mortality rate at the camp.

He concludes that it is due to "scorbutic dysentery" (bloody diarrhea caused by vitamin C deficiency), yet in hindsight it is likely that the cause of fatal emaciation and diarrhea was rampant hookworm disease, a condition not recognized or known during the Civil War.