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The Confederate Surgeon was faced with more hardships
than his Northern brother in the pursuit of the practice of medicine. The South
suffered much from lack of supplies during most of the War Between the States.
This is an account given to a group of CSA doctors after the War. It appears in
the Southern Historical Society Papers. Vol. XVII. Richmond, Va.,
January-December. 1889. Title: Confederate Surgeons.
An Address before the Association of the Survivors
of the Confederate Surgeons of South Carolina, at the Annual Meeting held at
Columbia, S.C., November, 1889.
BY F. PEYRE PORCHER, A. B., M.D.,
Surgeon to the Holcombe Legion, to the Confederate Hospital, Fort
Nelson, Norfolk Harbor, and the South Carolina Hospital, Petersburg,
Virginia.
Fellow Survivors of the Medical Departments of the Army and
Navy of South Carolina:
MR. PRESIDENT,--It was a happy inspiration which
prompted us to gather in this capital of South Carolina three years since to
organize an association of the surviving surgeons of the separate departments of
the army and navy. It partakes of the character of a Medical Cincinnati Society,
which is right and proper, as it proposes to transmit to those of immediate
descent, certain rights and privileges which have been dearly purchased.
If
men were born free and equal, they did not long remain so--for distinctions very
soon arose based on difference of conduct, of character, or talents. If your
ancestors fought and bled, and gave their property or their lives freely for
their country, whilst ours remained at home in inglorious ease, or were
money-changers, and wholly devoid of patriotism, we must naturally expect that
superior respect and position--other things being equal--should be accorded you,
and, by virtue of a more honorable past, you should receive a fuller
recognition from society and the world. As Pinckney and Rutledge, Moultrie and
Marion, Pickens, Gadsden, Sumter, Richardson, and Bratton left to their
descendants a record of good birth, character and capacity, there was
presumptive evidence that such superior hereditary qualities would be
maintained. Can there be any doubt, also, that Hampton, Butler, Anderson and
Kershaw; Gregg, Hagood, Evans, Bratton and Jenkins; McGowan, Elliott, Conner,
Manigault, Aiken and Capers; Barker and Gaillard, McMaster and Haskell; the
Wallaces, and-- "Hundred others whom we fear to name,
More than from Argos
or Mycenae came,"--
must justly transmit to their descendants some of the
fame which they so dearly acquired, and that the halo which surrounded their
brows will not entirely disappear in the lapse of time.
So we hope to
transmit to the descendants of the survivors, testimonials to the conduct and
behavior of their proavi.
It is becoming and necessary that a record should
be kept of what was accomplished in those four years of a most bloody and
disastrous war, when responsible acts, often requiring the greatest personal
coolness and courage, were performed by men of our profession, who had been
wholly untrained in the art and requirements of actual warfare. It must be
noted, also, that they quietly fulfilled the most arduous, delicate and
responsible duties unaccompanied by the ordinary expedients which are resorted
to to incite and cheer the soldier; they were men who it was not deemed
necessary to stimulate by adventitious aids, by mention in the gazettes, by
brevet ranks conferred, by commendations read at the head of regiments, or
reports sent up to headquarters--when the battle ended and the records of
victory or defeat were recited.
They stood in need of no such aids,
artificial or natural. These were the men who would only be referred to--if fate
so willed it--in the list of casualties; and even in grave official histories of
the campaigns, it is seldom that the presence, acts or the self-sacrifices of
the medical staff would be recorded. In proof of which, since the war, we have
seen no statement regarding the position, the conduct or the services of the
medical department of the army in the great contest in which they played a most
essential, if not the most conspicuous part.
Nor did they ask or expect fame,
either present or posthumous. For conscious that, as members of a noble
profession, the special duties they were called upon to execute were
of a high and exalted order, the approval of their immediate commander, the
confidence
of the sick or wounded--these, with the support of their own
con-
science, must be their supreme and only ambition.
With a sphere so
limited, with reward so meagre and inadequate in comparison with those bestowed
upon their military associates of similar or superior rank, we are now entitled
to award them the highest credit for the unselfish performance of duty--whether
done within the walls of a hospital, to the sick or wounded soldier in his
quarters, or, as was often the case, in the face of the enemy, surrounded by
danger and death, and equally exposed with the private soldier to shot and shell
and to death-dealing missiles from those "instruments of precision "--as they
were called--which sped with "damnable iteration," the "leaden
messengers
That ride upon the violent speed of fire."
And your speaker is
fully warranted in rendering this tardy justice, as he cannot claim to have
fully participated in the special exposures which you encountered. To prove
the devotion and the heroism of the surgeon and his youthful assistants, we
would briefly recall some scenes which occurred at Petersburg, Va., near the
close of that period when the beleaguered town was being shut in by a cordon of
earthworks, crowned with batteries belching forth their bolted thunders,--the
lines of the enemy were being pressed in closer and closer, the fire of every
species of armament was converging upon that devoted centre, and the roar of
cannon and the detonation of small arms "would deafen you to hear." So incessant
was the cannonading from some quarter of the heavens, and so great the roar of
artillery, that it seemed to the doomed city that a battle was almost constantly
in progress.
The surgeons and assistant surgeons, the generals and the
officers lived with their men in the open fields, in trenches swept by the fire
of the enemy, literally in ditches and holes burrowed in the earth, hair filled
with water--from which they were sometimes in the rainy season driven out like
rats. Half starved, upon the coarsest food, in cold and storm and rain, exposed
to every hazard--these, our brethren of the medical department, quailed not;
they patiently submitted to every hardship, often with systems shattered by
privation and ill-health, whilst they performed services which required skill,
care and serene courage.
No extended reference can be made here to privations
endured in prisons; and more than one example exists of voluntary
surrender by surgeons in order that they might not be separated from their sick
and wounded. Even those in the comparative shelter of hospitals--especially
those placed near to the immediate theatre of the war, had by no means light
duties to perform, nor were unexposed to the dangers of the battlefield whilst
in attendance upon the sick and wounded. They also were quite within range of
shot and shell. Shells passed frequently over the South Carolina hospital at
Petersburg. One struck within a few feet of the fourth ward, another entered the
ninth, and a third passed through one of the tents provided to relieve the
hospital--over-crowded with the sick and wounded. Before it became no longer
tenable and was evacuated, the surgeon had to distribute the
amputations--including also two resections of the shoulder--among his five
assistants; and the whole of three entire days and nights, without cessation,
were required to complete the work.
Batteries like Wagner, it is no
exaggeration to say--were ofttimes wrapped in a gloom more sulphurous and fiery
than that of Phlegethon or of Tartarus--made more terrible by the crash of those
bolts of steel, impelled with vengeful fury, which rained upon them by day and
by night. The defence was so desperate and destructive that the troops and their
medical attendants had to be frequently relieved. Sumter, Mobile and Vicksburg
were scarcely more endurable.
These facts are mentioned to show some of the
reasons which justify us in recalling at our annual meeting the events of the
past; that our associates and those who come after, may know how the medical
department comported itself in the trials of that great and bloody war, which to
many of us in memory seems now but a dream of the past.
In our opinion no
sufficient tribute has ever been paid to the matchless organization of the
medical department of the Confederate army as presented by the surgeon-general's
office; and we regret that more has not been said and earlier, in order that
before the death of that incomparable officer, Surgeon Samuel Preston Moore, he
may have learned how much his services were esteemed. A native of Charleston and
a man trained in the army, with all its ideas of discipline, its rigidity and
its formality, he may have contracted certain habitudes which deprived his
manners--not of the repose "which stamps the caste of Vere de Vere," for of that
he had enough and to spare--but of that softness and suavity which are used in
representative democracies and in all non-military communities.
Within his domain, which was a very extensive one, he had absolute
power and the fiat of an autocrat; the Emperor of the Russias was not more
autocratic. He commanded and it was done. He stood in terrorem over the surgeon,
whatever his rank or wherever he might be--from Richmond to the trans
Mississippi, and to the extremest verge of the Confederate States. And though
appearing to be cold and forbidding, we do not think that Surgeon Moore was
cruel, arbitrary, or insensible to conviction. We have ourselves experienced
some of his stern rulings, which were afterwards fully compensated for. But
where, or under what government so complicated and extensive as this, was there
ever a department of the public service characterized by such order and
precision? Every paper emanating from that office was a model of despatch and
neatness; and the chief introduced various measures for the relief of the
medical department when the country was suffering privations, and in want of the
ordinary necessaries of life. It will be remembered, also, that included in the
sphere of his duties was the providing the medical supplies needed for the
entire army--which had to be imported in great measure; and the hospitals and
other branches of the service were fairly supplied with quinia, morphia, iron,
chloroform and surgical appliances.
If the writer is permitted to say it
here, the hospitals at Norfolk and Petersburg under his care were never allowed
to be without these essential articles--which were purchased when needed by
private contributions from friends in Charleston.
But that we may avoid the
imputation of being indiscriminately a laudator temporis acti, we think there
were some grave mistakes committed. One of the most serious was the failure to
send surgeons of known skill and experience into positions where they might do
most good--into the field or into large hospitals--in place of permitting them
to remain in high cathedral places as medical examiners, medical directors, in
charge of stations for purveying and distributing medical supplies, etc.
Surgeons of the first ability were appointed to these offices--doubtless of
importance--but which could have been filled by others fully competent who had
not devoted their lives to surgery. It seems strange that men, just at the
period when their special capacities could be applied to the greatest advantage,
were indeed absolutely demanded by the exigency, were diverted from the branch
in which they were particularly proficient to such peaceful pursuits, whilst the
assistant surgeon, sometimes the full surgeon, was sent to the front
and had the most responsible work in any army to perform; the care of the
desperately wounded and the sick of every description, who required immediate
attention, were often thrust upon them when they may have had little or no
opportunities for acquiring practical skill.
The surgeon-general issued some
valuable and useful publications, but we had no "Medical and Surgical History of
the Confederate States"; we had scarcely a journal; we had no "Army Medical
Museum"; we had no men of science with leisure to produce original work, or to
record, classify and arrange the rich and abundant material gathered in the
departments of either medicine or surgery. We did what we could; but we were
working on a semi-starvation basis, pressed down with the cares of the war and
of the family; and whilst we admire the genius and enterprise of our then enemy
in their admirable illustrations of the records of the war, we could not expect
to compete with the highly-organized and lavishly-supplied medical and surgical
departments of the United States of the North.
Your speaker would be very remiss if on an occasion like
this, and whilst commenting favorably on our own department, he should forget
the tribute we owe the Confederate soldier. The surgeon knows the soldier better
than any one else; he has occupied peculiar relations to him, and he should
freely express what deserves to be said in his behalf.
But first permit us to
say that in a paper(*) prepared for Surgeon Moore near the close of the war,
never issued by that officer--as Richmond was soon abandoned--occasion was taken
to refer to the diseases from which the Confederate soldier suffered. Prominent
among these were chronic relaxing diseases, and the following statement was
emphasized, the accuracy of which some of our colleagues may justify: "The
dominant fact which must impress and modify the whole course of treatment to
which any judicious surgeon would subject him, unquestionably was prostration."
Exhaustion was the great characteristic, as well as the essential element to be
considered and combatted; and the natural corollary was that he was to be
nourished and stimulated as far as the resources of the service permitted;
and the treatment was of course to be modified in view of the
prevalent condition just stated, with the studious avoidance of all pertubative,
depressing measures, drastics, ptyalism, etc.
What was applicable to
well-nourished civilians would not apply to the soldier with his gastric
irritability, his colliquative disease, his gastralgia, and more especially his
nostalgia.
The fact being determined, it was acted upon practically; the
promise of a furlough was found to be superior to the whole pharmacop'a, and
would literally rescue a sick or wounded soldier from the jaws of death. We have
seen them turn to the wall to die, and yet leave for their homes a few days
after under the revivifying influence of hope and a return to their families and
all which it implied. When it was averred that one or two died on the road, the
question was asked, But how many were saved?
From this brief and imperfect
description of the depressing effects produced by the circumstances which
surrounded the Confederate soldier, the modification in his management became of
the first importance.
The "pathology of Shakespeare," as the learned and
elegant Watson has called it, when he speaks of "rasing out the written troubles
of the brain" and "ministering to a mind diseased," was therefore required to be
observed by the surgeon with the greatest advantage. For, superadded to the
prostration and general asthenic state which we have asserted to be the dominant
feature of our sick soldiers; there was, also, very generally extreme apathy as
to results, however sombre might be their complexion, or even fatal to their
hopes, wishes or lives.
The Confederate soldier resigned himself to his fate.
Once that it was decided that a return home was impossible for him and he must
remain in hospital, the physiognomy of his condition was admirably expressed by
the phrase poco curante, which he carried in every feature of his face, in his
gait and in his bearing. When he entered the service, whether from compulsion
or, as in nearly every instance, urged by a noble patriotism, his mind was
prepared for any fate; and he went forth, having adopted the desperate maxim of
Mezentius--"Jam venio moriturus." The scenes of danger, also, through which he
had passed had strung his nerves to so high a pitch of tension--so much higher
than mere illness, which is far below the battlefield in the stirring intensity
or the elevation of the emotion it excites--that he was not impressed by his
present peril, however imminent might be the fate which it threatened. He was
therefore languid, careless and indifferent, and his mind needed to be
aroused and stimulated.
As a striking proof of the apathy of the soldier when
he takes asylum in hospital, it may be stated that on the occasion of a visit by
General Lee to the farm, near Petersburg, to which the sick and wounded had been
removed, he visited many of the tents. There was not the slightest excitement or
enthusiasm manifested--no exclamation or apparent recognition of their beloved
leader by a single individual. Politeness compelled us to occupy a singular
rôle, and in every instance to announce the presence of their commander-in-chief
and to introduce him to his soldiers.
What a contrast to their reception on
every other occasion, as when surrounded by his generals he rode in review; or
when all life and energy and courage they were ready for any enterprise--and
meeting the same man in the fore-front of the hottest battle--with a wild cheer
of recognition, they would turn his horse aside that he might not encounter the
danger which menaced them.
There was no one so uncomplaining as the
Confederate soldier. Every surgeon who has seen active service will confirm the
truth and accuracy of a picture drawn without exaggeration. In your daily rounds
to offer him relief he gazes upon you, but does not complain that you pass him
by, asks for nothing, does not bemoan his fate, nor murmur at the insufficiency
of either food or attendance. He may lay sick under a broiling sun, in a heated
tent; or wounded, he may languish in the hospital amid the dying and the dead,
surrounded by everything to appal even well men
* * * * * * * * *
crudelis,
Ubique luctus, ubique payor, Et plurima mortis imago; yet the
mere stripling possessed his soul unterrified, and uttered neither cry nor
groan. There was always a courage and a resolution mingled with his apparent
indifference, which has extorted our admiration and has compelled us
involuntarily to recall the noble description of the invincible Cato: "The whole
world was subdued, save the intrepid soul of Cato."
Omne terrarum subacta,
Preter atroeem anitaurn
Catohis. In this display of his courage there was an inexorable sternness
almost amounting to atrocity. When the soldier, leaving friends, kindred and
home, delivers up his life for his country, he has paid the dearest
tribute which men can offer, and there is a moral sublimity in the act which
ennobles the very poorest. In every age the sacrifice has been immortalized in
verse and song, and the divine Dante says of him:
"He goes in quest of
liberty--which is so dear,
As he knew best who gave his life for
it."
Libertà va cercando, ch'e si cara, Come sa chi per lei vita
rifiuta.
It was a great error to confound the Confederate soldier, as some of
our surgeons did, with those of a standing army, or with mercenary troops, and
treat them with harshness or disdain. The great majority did not require to be
drafted into the army; honor and patriotism carried and kept them there. They
were our brethren and our friends--sometimes our superiors; and though only
privates, often the social equals of the best and highest in the army. Nor was
his bearing that of an inferior. We all know the free, unconcerned air and
carriage of the soldier, and how he would chaff his colonel or his general as
readily as his comrades, whenever he could do so with impunity.
Many noble
youths who were killed in battle or who perished by disease were after the
pattern of
"Little Giffen, of Tennessee,"
ill-clad, ill-fed, humble
heroes--the peers of any major-general or surgeon-general in the army. There
were others more delicately reared, but not more true and loyal than these--high
bred, gentle, keenly sensitive youths--who felt a stain as they would a
blow--but brave as lions--who freely gave their lives, with only a tear for
those at home, in obedience to the demands of that in-born nobility which sent
them forth at the call of their bleeding country.
* * "Lycidas is dead, dead
ere his prime, Young Lycidas, and hath not left his peer."
Finally,
brethren, in looking around us now on the "survivors," we see no men like the
militia colonels of the dear old ante-bellum days--decked in gay apparel, the
"cynosure of neighboring eyes," as when, decorated and bedizened for a fourth of
July celebration, they were surrounded by applauding multitudes and accompanied
by bands of music-
"Sonorous metal blowing martial sounds."
But, on the
contrary, we gaze--not without emotion--upon real veterans--men
advanced in years, and of somewhat grave aspect, who are not without the marks
of care and anxiety, oppressed, doubtless, by the troublous times through which
themselves and those dependent upon them have passed in the struggle for life,
and during a period of waste and misrule unexampled in the history of the world.
Yet we feel sure that trained as you have been, and nurtured in the school of
adversity, these difficulties were confronted with brave hearts, made strong by
the experiences of the past.
Some of us, even at the beginning of the
contest, had reached what the poet of the Inferno calls "the middle of the
journey of life"; and now, when near a quarter of a century has elapsed, and we
are still spared, we might recall with profit the sad but beautiful allegory,
"The Vision of Mirza," and remember the bridge with the swiftly moving tide that
flowed underneath, with the innumerable trap doors that lay concealed, and
through which the passengers were falling one by one, some dropping in
unexpectedly; and it was observed that the greater number fell near the
beginning and at the ending of life. Or we may well be admonished, each of us,
that we must soon join the great army which has gone before; and it will surely
be esteemed a privilege and an honor that we, also, were of the number of those
who went to the defence of their State and country, and did what in them lay to
protect, uphold and preserve, by land and sea, "A Lost Cause."
USCivilWar.Net wants to thank
Jenny Goellnitz for compiling this information. jgoellnitz@yahoo.com
