The Medical Department in the Civil War

I propose to deal briefly with the place our great profession held morally and technically in the war of the sixties. It is a record to be proud of, or I should not so willingly revert to it. If you look for that story in the histories, they are silent; if you search for it in the countless autobiographies of soldiers great or small, these too are mute except as to what the soldier did. A few forgotten books by surgeons are personal or technical, and tell us little more than the baldest story of the individual. What else there is may be found scattered through the huge volumes on the medical history of the war. We gain nowhere a sense of the immensity of the task which as a profession we dealt with. We hear little or nothing of the unequaled capacity with which we met the call on