Recollections of a Civil War Medical Cadet

Description

In July 1862, Burt Green Wilder left Boston to join Dr. Francis Brown, a surgeon working at Judiciary Square Hospital, one of the new army pavilion hospitals in Washington, D.C. Wilder had just finished his degree in comparative anatomy at Harvard, and the chance to assist Brown rather than serve as a soldier in the army was appealing. For the next ten months Wilder worked in the hospital's wards as a medical cadet. Although he lacked formal medical training, he had aptitude, ability, and an advanced knowledge of anatomy. These qualities were increasingly valued in a medical department being reformed by the new surgeon general, William Hammond, who demanded a more scientific approach to medical care and to the creation and dissemination of medical knowledge. Forty-five years after the war ended Wilder began to draft his recollections of an era that had transformed him personally and radically altered American medicine.Richard M. Reid's introduction captures the ways the war dramatically reconfigured the American medical landscape. Prior to the war, the medical community was badly fragmented, and elite physicians felt undervalued by the American public. The war offered them the chance to assert their professional control and to make medicine more scientific and evidence-based. The introduction also includes an extensive historiographical analysis of Civil War medicine and situates Wilder's recollections in the changing direction of the field.Wilder's manuscript, largely finished but never published, is written with humor and grace and provides a revealing eyewitness account of Civil War relief services and hospital work. The army hospitals, dramatically different from the prewar institutions, became centers of medical innovation and analytical record keeping. Even medical cadets such as Wilder conducted postmortems and were encouraged to submit specimens of combat-related injuries to Hammond's newly created Army Medical Museum. His discussions of the day-to-day practice in the hospital, the war's expansion of medical knowledge, the duties of medical cadets, scientific activity, and gender relations are particularly compelling.Recollections of a Civil War Medical Cadet provides an important source to understand wartime medicine, the impact of the conflict on American medicine in the nineteenth century, and the little discussed role of the medical cadet in the army medical system.

Sujets

• Médecine
• USA
• United States of America
• Memoir
• History of medicine
• History of the Americas
• American Civil War
• États-Unis
• Guerre de Sécession

Informations

• Publié par: The Kent State University Press
• Date de parution: 25 juillet 2017
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781631012686
• Langue: English

Extrait

RECOLLECTIONS of a CIVIL WAR MEDICAL CADET
CIVIL WAR IN THE NORTH
Broken Glass: Caleb Cushing and the Shattering of the Union · John M. Belohlavek
Banners South: A Northern Community at War · Edmund J. Raus
“Circumstances are destiny”: An Antebellum Woman’s Struggle to Define Sphere · Tina Stewart Brakebill
More Than a Contest between Armies: Essays on the Civil War · Edited by James Marten and A. Kristen Foster
August Willich’s Gallant Dutchmen: Civil War Letters from the 32nd Indiana Infantry · Translated and Edited by Joseph R. Reinhart
Meade’s Army: The Private Notebooks of Lt. Col. Theodore Lyman · Edited by David W. Lowe
Dispatches from Bermuda: The Civil War Letters of Charles Maxwell Allen, U.S. Consul at Bermuda, 1861–1888 · Edited by Glen N. Wiche
The Antebellum Crisis and America’s First Bohemians · Mark A. Lause
Orlando M. Poe: Civil War General and Great Lakes Engineer · Paul Taylor
Northerners at War: Reflections on the Civil War Home Front · J. Matthew Gallman
A German Hurrah! Civil War Letters of Friedrich Bertsch and Wilhelm Stängel, 9th Ohio Infantry · Translated and Edited by Joseph R. Reinhart
“They Have Left Us Here to Die”: The Civil War Prison Diary of Sgt. Lyle G. Adair, 111th U.S. Colored Infantry · Edited by Glenn Robins
The Story of a Thousand: Being a History of the Service of the 105th Ohio Volunteer Infantry in the War for the Union, from August 21, 1862, to June 6, 1865 · Albion W. Tourgée, Edited by Peter C. Luebke
The Election of 1860 Reconsidered · Edited by A. James Fuller
“A Punishment on the Nation”: An Iowa Soldier Endures the Civil War · Edited by Brian Craig Miller
Yankee Dutchmen under Fire: Civil War Letters from the 82nd Illinois Infantry · Translated and Edited by Joseph R. Reinhart
The Printer’s Kiss: The Life and Letters of a Civil War Newspaperman and His Family · Edited by Patricia A. Donohoe
Conspicuous Gallantry: The Civil War and Reconstruction Letters of James W. King, 11th Michigan Volunteer Infantry · Edited by Eric R. Faust
Johnson’s Island: A Prison for Confederate Officers · Roger Pickenpaugh
Lincoln’s Generals’ Wives: Four Women Who Influenced the Civil War—for Better and for Worse · Candice Shy Hooper
For Their Own Cause: The 27th United States Colored Troops · Kelly D. Mezurek
“Our Little Monitor”: The Greatest Invention of the Civil War · Anna Gibson Holloway and Jonathan W. White
Recollections of a Civil War Medical Cadet · Burt Green Wilder, Edited by Richard M. Reid
RECOLLECTIONS of a CIVIL WAR MEDICAL CADET
Burt Green Wilder Edited by Richard M. Reid

The Kent State University Press   •   Kent, Ohio
© 2017 by The Kent State University Press, Kent, Ohio 44242
All rights reserved
ISBN 978-1-60635-328-8
Manufactured in the United States of America
Cataloging information for this title is available at the Library of Congress.
21  20  19  18  17      5  4  3  2  1
To
JAMIE SNELL,
a respected colleague, a life mentor, and a close friend.
CONTENTS

List of Illustrations
Introduction
RECOLLECTIONS OF A CIVIL WAR MEDICAL CADET Burt Green Wilder
Notes
Index
ILLUSTRATIONS

Fig. 1. Map of Washington, 1862
Fig. 2. J. F. Alleyne Adams
Fig. 3. Sophronia Bucklin
Fig. 4. William A. Hammond
Fig. 5. Floor plan of Judiciary Square Hospital
Fig. 6. Sarah Milliken
Fig. 7. Ward in Judiciary Square Hospital
Fig. 8. Burt G. Wilder
Fig. 9. James R. May
Fig. 10. James H. Fowler
Fig. 11. Sarah Nichols
Fig. 12. Joseph T. Rothrock
Fig. 13. Elias J. Marsh
Fig. 14. Jimmy Noland
Fig. 15. Sketch of John Brinton’s office with Wilder’s desk
Fig. 16. Sketch of Wilder’s room at the Judiciary Square Hospital
Fig. 17. Jeffries Wyman
Fig. 18. Floor plan of a ward in the Judiciary Square Hospital
Fig. 1. Map of Washington, 1862. (Map by Marie Puddister)
INTRODUCTION Wilder’s Professional Career

B URT G REEN W ILDER was an inveterate writer all of his life, as indicated by the size and diversity of his publications. 1 By the time he was planning his retirement from Cornell University in 1910, at the age of seventy, he was working on several manuscripts covering important parts of his life, which he planned to publish. Although he never finished these projects, he left several virtually completed manuscripts dealing with his Civil War experiences, which form part of the extensive Burt Green Wilder Papers now held by the Cornell Library. 2 One of the manuscripts that he had worked on, but had not fully completed at the time of his death, drew on recollections of his service as a medical cadet in the Judiciary Square Hospital in Washington, D.C., where he worked in the second year of the war. 3 He believed it was an important story to tell.
That Wilder was at the hospital at all was serendipitous. As he explained in his manuscript, in the summer of 1862 he faced a series of important personal decisions. Under the direction of Jeffries Wyman, he was about to finish his degree in anatomy and physiology at the Lawrence Scientific School of Harvard University; he was in debt; and he well understood the societal pressures on a healthy twenty-one-year-old man to join the Union army. At the same time, he believed he had neither the desire nor the aptitude to serve in the ranks as an infantryman. Despite this reluctance, however, he had already decided he would serve as a substitute for a friend, Edward Carter, if that person were drafted. Before that happened, a former student of Wyman, Dr. Francis H. Brown, who worked in the Judiciary Square Hospital in Washington but was home on leave, asked Wilder to join him as an acting medical cadet. Wilder agreed, in part because his close friend, James F. Alleyne Adams, had been offered a similar position at the hospital.
The critical demand for medical personnel as the war ground on into a second bloody year gave Wilder and Adams an opportunity to serve in the Washington hospital although neither man had the credentials officially required. Congress had created the medical cadet position in the summer of 1861, in response to the crisis created by mass mobilization and the growing ranks of sick and wounded soldiers. Although the duties and duration of the position were spelled out in the establishing legislation, like so many things in the war, practical needs soon outstripped theory. The act that established the position of medical cadet envisioned that the cadets would “act as dressers in the general hospitals and as ambulance attendants in the field” and would have “the same rank and pay as the military cadets at West Point.” Successful candidates would be men between the ages of eighteen and twenty-three who were “of liberal education, students of medicine … who had been reading medicine for two years, and have attended at least one course of lectures in a medical college.” 4 The term of enlistment was set at one year. That the army prescribed a set of shoulder straps for medical cadets to be worn on an officer’s frock coat symbolized their expected position in the hierarchy of an army hospital. 5
The Surgeon General’s Office was quickly convinced that medical cadets were an important addition to the medical personnel. In November 1861, Surgeon General Clement A. Finley claimed they were “of great service in the fields and in the hospitals, increasing the efficiency of the medical department by an intelligent assistance.” He recommended the addition of another fifty cadets to the corps. 6 The cadets’ valuable role in the military hospitals, plus the serious shortage of trained medical attendants, explained the Medical Department’s willingness to accept men such as Wilder and Adams as acting medical cadets when they did not have the specified requirements but came well recommended. 7
Wilder and Adams left Boston together and arrived in Washington on 15 July 1862. For the next ten months, Wilder served, first as an acting medical cadet and then, following his successful examination on 8 October 1862, as a regular medical cadet at the Judiciary Square Hospital. The hospital was one of the first midsize pavilion hospitals constructed in the city, and his posting to the hospital brought him into contact with many of the medical reforms being implemented by the Army Medical Department under the new surgeon general, William A. Hammond. Even though he had no formal medical training when he went to Washington, Wilder clearly showed aptitude, ability, and an advanced knowledge of anatomy in an environment that increasingly emphasized a scientific and systematic approach to the provision of medical care. He had received his comparative anatomy degree from Harvard summa cum laude and had given public lectures on a variety of natural history topics, two of which had been published. 8 He arrived at the hospital just as the Medical Department began to focus on the production and dissemination of medical knowledge—writing of case histories, debating unfamiliar conditions, and providing support for medical writing and publication. It was an ideal environment for Wilder, and it undoubtedly influenced his future development. It was, however, the scientific rather than the medical component of his work that acted as a catalyst for his postwar career.
His talents were soon evident to Dr. John Brinton, a senior officer in the Medical Department, who was always looking for talented young men. The Washington meetings of the Army Medical Society, initially open only to army surgeons and senior medical officers, broadened its membership and welcomed interested medical cadets. Wilder first attended in December 1862 when he presented a patient with a “right shoulder-blade curiously misplaced” ( 41–42 ). 9 Three weeks later, Brinton visited the Judiciary Square Hospital to inspect unusual medical cases, and, as Wilder recorded, he “seemed much pleased that I was keeping an independent record of such cases in our ward” ( 50 ). In late January, Brinton asked the young cad