Though wartime surgery remained largely the same until after the US Civil War, it is usually movies about that conflict in which we see the nature of combat surgery before the understanding and acceptance of germ theory and widespread use of anesthesia. Usually, the hero of the movie is carried into a blood-stained canvas tent with doctors and orderlies wearing leather aprons. These aprons were water, or rather, blood-proof, and in Civil War hospitals, there was an awful lot of blood.