SURGICAL REMINISCENCES OF THE

CIVIL WAR.*

I

HAD the honor of being sworn into the service of the United States as an Assistant Surgeon in the shadow of the Capitol on July 4, 1861, though I had only begun the study of medicine in September, 1860, and did not graduate until March, 1862. It came about in this wise. My preceptor, Dr. John H. Brinton, had received a telegram from a former student (let us call him Smith), who had graduated in March, 1861, and was Assistant Surgeon of the Fifth Massachusetts, saying that he was going to leave the regiment and asking that Dr. Brinton should immediately send some one in his place if possible. Dr. Brinton very kindly offered the place to me. I said to him with very becoming modesty that I hardly felt I knew enough, to which he replied with combined frankness and flattery by saying: "It is perfectly true that you know very little, but, on the other hand, you know a good deal more than Smith." Accordingly I entered the army and immediately went into camp in Alexandria.

From the 4th until the Battle of Bull Run, Sunday, July 21, 1861, fortunately, I had very little to do. The surgeon of the regiment attended to sick call, while I tried to make myself somewhat familiar with military surgery. I remember only too well, however, the trepidation with which I went to attend one member of my regiment who accidentally had shot himself through the chest. If the soldier had known how slender was my own fund of information, his breast would have harbored not only a serious gunshot

* Read before the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, April 5, 1905. Dr. S. Weir Mitchell and Dr. John S. Billings contributed papers on their reminiscences at the same time.

wound, but many disturbing doubts as to the probability of his recovery in the hands of Assistant Surgeon Verdant Green.

My first initiation into real warfare was at the First Bull Run. We had marched the day before until after midnight and were awakened after a brief sleep to the activities of a memorable day in the history of the war. It was an exceedingly hot day, and we marched and halted and marched and halted in the thick dust under a broiling sun until about noon, when my regiment became engaged. Up to that time, and, in fact, during the entire engagement, I never received a single order from either Colonel or other officer, Medical Inspector, the surgeon of my regiment, or any one else. It was like the days when there was no King in Israel, and every man did that which was right in his own eyes. I did not see the surgeon from the middle of the forenoon.

As we approached the battlefield, I saw beside a little stream a few surgeons, among whom I knew one, and I asked him what I ought to do, for I was as green as the grass around me as to my duties on the field.* My friend Carr, of Rhode Island, suggested that I should turn in there and help, advice which I followed all the more readily because just at that time some of the advance of my own regiment appeared among the wounded. After a time, I saw everybody around me packing up and leaving, and upon asking what was the reason, was told that we were ordered back to Sedley Springs Church, a mile or more in the rear. Accordingly I went with them, and there in a grove alongside of the road, with no fence to enclose it, stood the little church perhaps one hundred feet distant from the road.

* Surgeon W. S. King, of the regulars (“Medical and Surgical History of the Rebellion," Part I, Medical Volume, Appendix, p. 2), calls attention to the fact that he and Assistant Surgeon Magruder were, with few exceptions, the only medical officers at the first battle of Bull Run who had ever served with troops in the field.

Both inside and outside the church much was going on. An operating table was improvised from two boards laid on two boxes in front of the pulpit; the slightly injured looked down from the gallery upon the industrious surgeons, and a number of kind women from the neighborhood helped to soothe the wounded.

I always have remembered one little illustration of the ignorance even of brigade surgeons who had been hastily appointed at the outbreak of the war. One of the wounded required an amputation at the shoulder-joint, and the operator asked the brigade surgeon to compress the subclavian artery. This he proceeded to do by vigorous pressure applied below the clavicle. With a good deal of hesitation, I at last timidly suggested to him that possibly compression above the clavicle would be more efficacious, when, with withering scorn, he informed me that he was pressing in the right place as was proved by the name of the artery, which was subclavian. I do not remember whether the operator took a hand in this little linguistic discussion or even overheard it. I had my rather grim revenge, happily, not to the serious disadvantage of the patient. When the operator made the internal flap the axillary artery gave one enormous jet of blood, for the subclavian persisted in running where it could be compressed above the clavicle, in spite of its name. I caught the artery in the flap, as I had been taught to do by Dr. Brinton, and instantly controlled the hæmorrhage.

Later, I was outside the church dressing a man who had a fracture of the humerus from a Minié ball. I was applying a splint and an eight-yard bandage. We were in the wood surrounding the church, perhaps twenty feet back from the road, when suddenly one hundred or more of the soldiers rushed pell-mell down the road from the battlefield crying "the rebs are after us!" It did not take more than one positive assertion of this kind to convince the man

whose arm I was bandaging that it was time for him to leave, and he broke away from me, rushing for the more distant woods. As he ran, four or five yards of the bandage unwound, and I last saw him disappearing in the distance with this fluttering bobtail bandage flying all abroad.

My experience in this battle is a good illustration of the utter disorganization, or rather want of organization, of our entire army at the beginning of the war. It was wittily expressed in a statement which appeared in "Vanity Fair," the "Puck" or "Life" of 1861. The editor announced that he had received from their correspondent on the field a dispatch which far surpassed that of Cæsar: it stated the location of the battle, described the varying fortunes of the day, and announced the final result. Their correspondent's laconic telegram also "ran:" "Bull Run, They Run, We Run."

Later in the day the Quartermaster of my regiment brought the Colonel, who had been badly injured by a falling limb of a tree cut off by a solid shot. He told me that orders had been issued for the army to retreat to Washington, and I joined them, caring on the way for the Colonel. Soon after the battle the time of my regiment expired and we were mustered out of the service.*

I resumed my studies in September, 1861, graduated in March, 1862, and two months later entered the army by examination. Under a medical officer of the army whom I scarcely saw I was put in charge of the Eckington General Hospital on the outskirts of Washington. Not long after taking charge, one Saturday afternoon about 4 o'clock, I received an order to report at the office of Dr. Letterman, the Medical Director of the Army of the Potomac, in Washington. I had had so little experience in army orders that I almost trembled at the formal and peremptory character

*For my report of the battle see "Medical and Surgical History of the War of the Rebellion," Part I, Medical Volume, Appendix, p. 9.

of the order. I feared that without knowing it I had done something to displease Mr. Stanton, the Secretary of War, who was a good deal of a bogy to most people at that time, for he had a way of putting them sometimes into Fort Delaware or other similar close quarters, without giving any reasons, too, which was very disagreeable.

When I reported to Dr. Letterman, however, I found that very stirring events were about to occur. He directed me to go to the Ascension Episcopal Church and the Eighth Street Methodist Church, which were just around the corner from each other, and prepare them for general hospitals; that I should find the Quartermaster already there making the needful alterations, and that I was to have them ready for occupation within five days. It was then about 5 o'clock on Saturday afternoon. I went to my field of duty and worked nearly all night, resuming my work very early in the morning. A gang of carpenters worked all night. At about 10 o'clock on Sunday morning the minister of the Ascension Church, who was well-known for his secession views, entered the main door, his eyes wide open with astonishment at what was going on both outside and inside of the church. Finally his inquiring gaze fell upon me, and, as I was in uniform, he judged that I could tell him the reason why the last pews were just disappearing under a new board floor. I answered his question by saying that the Secretary of War had taken possession of the churches of Washington and was converting them into hospitals, at which he uttered a "humph," turned on his heel, and I saw him no more. In sharp contrast was the action of the minister of the Methodist Church, who, with every member of his family, spent a large part of every day, and often the entire day, in the hospital ministering to the soldiers.

My assignment to this duty gave me another opportunity of learning how utterly deficient I was in training for my position. People sometimes imagine that a practising physi