Reports on the extent and nature of the materials available for the preparation of a medical and surgical history of the Rebellion.

Date:
1865
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Reports on the extent and nature of the materials available for the preparation of a medical and surgical history of the Rebellion. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    The surgical specimens of the Army Medical Museum number 5480; and not only in specimens of recent injuries, but in illustrations of reparative processes after injury, of morbid processes, of the results of operations, and of surgical apparatus and appli- ances, this institution is richer, numerically at least, than the medico-military museums of France or Great Britain. The value of these materials has been foreshadowed in referring to their nature and extent. It may be emphatically said that they throw much light on some of the great moot points in surgery; that they comprise on some subjects, as, for example, on the question of the propriety of excising the head of the femur for injury, fuller data than are now extant in the entire range of surgical literature; and that it may be hoped, without temerity, that they include the elements for the solution of many grave surgical problems. To render intelligible an account of the progress that has been made in collating and classifying the surgical records of this office, and the collections of the Army Medical Museum, it is requisite to review briefly the measures that have been adopted by the Medical Department to gather and preserve the observations of the medical officers of the Army, and to compile, in an available form, the results of their inquiries and of their vast surgical experience in the iate war. In 18G1, and during the first eight months of 1862, the case book and regis- ter, made obligatory by regulations, the monthly and quarterly reports of sick and wounded, and the sanitary reports required of regimental surgeons, and of the surgeons in charge of hospitals, were the channels through which medical officers communicated such professional facts as they desired to place on record. These sources of informa- tion have been decried in some quarters, and in an official report to this office,* in July, 1863, it was declared that previous to September, 1862, the surgical statistics of the war were absolutely worthless, and that the only information procurable is such as can be derived from the examination of a mass of reports, all of which present merely certain figures under the vague and unsatisfactory heading, 'Vulnus sclopeticum.' That the surgical records of a period including the casualties of the first and second battles of Manassas, the battles on the Chickahominy, Ball's Bluff, Cedar Mountain, and Shiloh, and in which the returns from about one-half of the regiments in the field give an aggregate of over thirty thousand cases of gunshot injury, were deserving of such emphatic censure would be a source of grave regret, and it is gratify- ing to be able to state that a careful re-examination of these records proves that they contain a large amount of material that is far from valueless. The reports of the Washington, Fort Monroe, Baltimore, and Philadelphia hospitals of the treatment of the wounded from the Peninsular campaign, are replete with interest; the reports of the hospitals at Alexandria give voluminous materials in regard to the wounded from Cedar Mountain and the second Bull Run. The surgical records of the Fort Donelson campaign are very complete. The returns of the casualties incurred in the operations in North Carolina are satisfactory. The extracts from the case books of Surgeons Page and Clements, and Assistant Surgeons Peters and Billings, of the Army, and of Sur-