Military doctors: then and now

Today on C-SPAN an army doctor was describing his experience at army hospitals in Iraq. His descriptions of the pain and suffering and the severity of wounds of the American troops and Iraqi civilians were gruesome indeed; his describing how soldiers cope with life after losing two or three limbs from their battle wounds was extremely touching. His commentary brought two things to my mind:

My antipathy toward George Bush for having brought on this ill-conceived, ill-managed war, thus causing these horrible stories.

Mt great grandfather’s experiences as a military doctor during the Mexican War and the Civil War. (I included these experiences in a posting entitled Surfing American history through Great Grandpa on 2/23/06.)

During the Mexican War he was a physician in the U.S. Navy. In a letter to his fiancée (later my great grandmother), dated October 1, 1846, written on board the Navy frigate Potomac en route to Vera Cruz, and posted at Pensacola, he wrote:

Our sick list has greatly diminished. We are getting rid of the scurvy very fast. A few weeks more will free us entirely of it...In addition to an extraordinary heavy sick list on board ship, we have 40 odd cases of (yellow) fever to attend to in the Navy Yard.

He added in that letter that he, too, had been sick with a fever.

Later, after North Carolina seceded from the Union, he joined the Confederate army as a physician. He wrote several letters to his family back home from the field of battle near Richmond. In one, dated June 6, 1864, he wrote:

I have been worked down and there is no end of it–I have never seen so many wounded men together as I have seen in the Yankee Hospital–800 or more all desperately wounded. My hands have been in dreadful condition from wounds received in operating on them.

I can only guess what he meant by the “Yankee Hospital”—possibly he was treating captured Union troops who had been wounded in battle.

In another letter, dated August 17, 1864, he wrote:

The Yanks are very near here, have been fighting for two days–shot and shell flying all in sight of my hospital. It is possible I shall have to move out of the building tomorrow.

After hearing the military doctor describe the terrible ordeal of treating badly wounded soldiers in Iraq--terrible even with all the techniques of modern medicine—I think how much worse it must have been for my great grandfather, 142 years ago, who had only the techniques of that day to work with.