Trueta Surgeon In War And Peace

This book is a Biography of James Langstaff Dunn, MD, Civil War Surgeon and unwavering Patriot, from Medical Student 1846 to War End 1865. A modern doctor, Paul B Kerr, MD, obtained 140 letters Dunn wrote to his dear wife, Temperance, and children, from his College and War years. Dr Kerr interprets the letters as relates to surgery, diseases, tent life, prisons, hospitals and logistics in the light of life and medicine today, and his own experiences in Army Medicine in WW II and Korea. Dr Kerr also discusses the knowledge of anesthesia in the 1800s, and how it evolved during 40 years of his own practice of anesthesia. Dunn was the Surgeon of the 109th PA Volunteers of Infantry for three years, a Batallion that carried many central assignments and battles. Fighting for 1 1/2 years with the Army of the Potomac, his unit did a second 1 1/2 years with the Army of the Tennessee. Dunn describes first-hand the Battles for Gettysburg, Chancellorsville, Chattanooga, Atlanta and the occupancy of Savannah. You won't forget his exhausting personal help for women and babies in the fiery destruction of Columbia, South Carolina. Nor will his description of first entry into Atlanta be forgotten. Dunn personally names Clara Barton "The Angel of the Battlefield." He witnesses the amazing assault on Lookout Mountain, visits relatives in Cincinnati and Nashville. In Washington, he observes President Lincoln and the huge tent city with thousands of marching men there. We have from him a dateline Washington, DC on the very day Lincoln was shot. We meet his boss and friend, General John Geary, who from Mayor of San Francisco and Governor of Kansas, becomes his Commandant, and, after the War, Governor of Pennsylvania. We learn first hand about drunkenness, "Hospital Gangrene;" and Dunn's encounters with slaves, the aristocracy of Virginia and the primitive whites of the Tennessee Mountains. Throughout, Dr Dunn keeps his morals, his devotion to the Union and his disgust with pacifists at home in Pennsylvania and in Congress. He discusses the Conscription Laws and means of substitution. His letters are full of Military Information that in other wars were subject to censorship. His 140 letters are as a "War Correspondent."

Jonathan Letterman was an outpost medical officer serving in Indian country in the years before the Civil War, responsible for the care of just hundreds of men. But when he was appointed the chief medical officer for the Army of the Potomac, he revolutionized combat medicine over the course of four major battles—Antietam, Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, and Gettysburg—that produced unprecedented numbers of casualties. He made battlefield survival possible by creating the first organized ambulance corps and a more effective field hospital system. He imposed medical professionalism on a chaotic battlefield. Where before 20 percent of the men were unfit to fight because of disease, squalid conditions, and poor nutrition, he improved health and combat readiness by pioneering hygiene and diet standards. Based on original research, and with stirring accounts of battle and the struggle to invent and supply adequate care during impossible conditions, this new biography recounts Letterman’s life from his small-town Pennsylvania beginnings to his trailblazing wartime years and his subsequent life as a wildcatter and the medical examiner of San Francisco. At last, here is the missing portrait of a key figure of Civil War history and military medicine. His principles of battlefield care continue to be taught to military commanders and first responders.

Doctors at War is a candid account of a trauma surgical team based, for a tour of duty, at a field hospital in Helmand, Afghanistan. Mark de Rond tells of the highs and lows of surgical life in hard-hitting detail, bringing to life a morally ambiguous world in which good people face impossible choices and in which routines designed to normalize experience have the unintended effect of highlighting war's absurdity. With stories that are at once comical and tragic, de Rond captures the surreal experience of being a doctor at war. He lifts the cover on a world rarely ever seen, let alone written about, and provides a poignant counterpoint to the archetypical, adrenaline-packed, macho tale of what it is like to go to war.Here the crude and visceral coexist with the tender and affectionate. The author tells of well-meaning soldiers at hospital reception, there to deliver a pair of legs in the belief that these can be reattached to their comrade, now in mid-surgery; of midsummer Christmas parties and pancake breakfasts and late-night sauna sessions; of interpersonal rivalries and banter; of caring too little or too much; of tenderness and compassion fatigue; of hell and redemption; of heroism and of playing God. While many good firsthand accounts of war by frontline soldiers exist, this is one of the first books ever to bring to life the experience of the surgical teams tasked with mending what war destroys.

J. Franklin Dyer?s journal offers a rare perspective on three years of the Civil War as seen through the eyes of a surgeon at the front. The journal, taken from letters written to his wife, Maria, describes in lengthy and colorful detail the daily life of a doctor who began as a regimental surgeon in the Nineteenth Massachusetts Volunteers and was promoted to acting medical director of the Second Corps, Army of the Potomac. ø This firsthand account traces Dyer?s attempts to manage his Gloucester household even as the Second Corps fought on the Peninsula, at Second Bull Run, Antietam, Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, and from the Wilderness to Petersburg. Over time his letters to his wife become fraught with the tension of a man losing his early martial ardor as he witnesses the ghastly procession of suffering and death. ø Both a talented surgeon and a careful administrator, Dyer nevertheless declined opportunities to work at hospitals in the rear in order to stay near his old regiment and the fighting. He confronted the aftermath of battle?thousands of wounded and dying men?with a small staff and simple instruments. He and his fellow surgeons saved lives as best they could?often at the cost of amputated limbs?then dropped to the ground from exhaustion and slept in blood-drenched uniforms until the cries of the wounded woke them and induced them back to work. Dyer also provides a glimpse of the most devastating opponent the armies faced: disease. He and his medical colleagues fought cholera, typhus, dysentery, measles, and, despite official denials in Washington , a scurvy outbreak that weakened Federal units during the Peninsula campaign.

This book illuminates how crucial transformations in medical politics and organisation were linked to wider changes in society, economy and ideology. Paying particular attention to developments in medical welfare for physically handicapped children, wounded soldiers and injured workers, this extensively documented study challenges conventional accounts of medical specialisation; provides Anglo-American comparisons; and demonstrates the importance for medical modernity of changing interactions between philanthropy, war, labour, capital and the state.

Lured across the border by promises of opportunity and adventure, Francis M. Wafer - a young student from Queen's Medical College in Kingston - joined the Union's army of the Potomac as an assistant surgeon. From the battle of the Wilderness to the closing campaigns, Wafer was both participant and chronicler of the American Civil War. Cheryl Wells provides an edited and fully annotated collection of Wafer's diary entries during the war, his letters home, and the memoirs he wrote after returning to Canada. Wafer's writings are a fascinating and deeply personal account of the actions, duties, feelings, and perceptions of a noncombatant who experienced the thick of battle and its grave consequences. The only substantial account by a Canadian Civil War soldier who returned to Canada, A Surgeon in the Army of the Potomac fills a critical gap in American Civil War historiography and will have broad appeal among scholars and enthusiasts.