Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 29.djvu/292

 276 Southern Historical Society Papers.

limited extent. To organize an efficient medical corps in such great emergency from unknown and scattered elements, became his first care. In this he found much difficulty from the fact that many of the most capable of the younger physicians, in the ardor of the time and from various causes, sought distinction in the ranks, and as offi- cers of commands, in the hope of more rapidly acquiring military fame. And as was the case in the other departments, there was in this one, great lack of the requisite stores, raw and manufactured, for field and hospital. Severed in every direction from the rest of the world of supplies by powerful armies and fleets, and by the early proclamations of the enemy declaring all medicines and surgical in- struments, books and appliances contraband of war, the medical de- partment was constrained to seek in its own forests and fields such substitutes as could be found for the more reliable medicines, and to build and establish laboratories for converting them into pharma- ceutical preparations in large quantities, and arrange them in conve- nient packages for wide distribution and use; to improvise and manufacture by unskilled artisans, and the scanty means at hand, such surgical instruments and appliances as their necessity required and ingenuity could invent, which could not be procured from the so-called underground railroad of the time, the occasional blockade runners, and the success of our brave soldiers in the field in captur- ing stores from the enemy, and to select appropriate sites and or- ganize hospitals, etc. Such, in part, were the problems which fell to him to solve.

THE CONFEDERATE SURGEON.

It has been reliably stated that there were in the scantily-clothed and foorly-fed Confederate army and navy about 1,000 surgeons and 2,000 assistant surgeons, without proper medicines and surgical instru- ments and "appliances to care for an army consisting, from first to last, of 600,000 troops, in deadly warfare with 2,859,132 troops of the United States army, supplied with the most modern equipments and arms, the most abundant clothing and food, and all that science and art could furnish in medicine and surgery.

It is estimated that more than 3,000,000 cases of wounds and disease was cared for by the medical corps of the Confederate army and navy during the war. It is also reliably stated that the whole number of Federal prisoners captured by the Confederates and held in southern prisons from the first to the last was in round numbers 270,000; while the whole number of Confederates captured and held