One-hundred fifty years after the Civil War, there are still untold stories. Over 11,000 surgeons served in the Union army; 10,400 were well behaved. The other 600 were in trouble for embezzlement, insubordination, rape, AWOL, desertion, surliness, stealing food, and a host of other misdeeds. One man was deemed, "Drunk, but not too drunk to operate." Another was hopping into the beds of women in the VD hospital. Yet another forged his own performance reports, reporting his own excellent character. A statistical study compares their incidence of malpractice with one of today's mid-West states.These remarkable stories are accompanied by full citations and are indexed by regiment. An eye-opener and a much-needed reference work.

Because they were situated near the Mason-Dixon line, Shepherdstown residents witnessed the realities of the Civil War firsthand. The Maryland Campaign of September 1862 brought thousands of wounded Confederates into the town's homes, churches and warehouses. The story of Shepherdstown's transformation into "one vast hospital" recounts nightmarish scenes of Confederate soldiers under the caring hands of an army of surgeons and civilians.

“An extremely detailed history of 160 hospital sites that formed to care for soldiers who were wounded at the Battle of Gettysburg.” —Civil War Cycling Nearly 26,000 men were wounded in the three-day battle of Gettysburg (July 1-3, 1863). It didn’t matter if the soldier wore blue or gray or was an officer or enlisted man, for bullets, shell fragments, bayonets, and swords made no class or sectional distinction. Almost 21,000 of the wounded were left behind by the two armies in and around the small town of 2,400 civilians. Most ended up being treated in makeshift medical facilities overwhelmed by the flood of injured. Many of these and their valiant efforts are covered in Greg Coco’s A Vast Sea of Misery. The battle to save the wounded was nearly as terrible as the battle that placed them in such a perilous position. Once the fighting ended, the maimed and suffering warriors could be found in churches, public buildings, private homes, farmhouses, barns, and outbuildings. Thousands more, unreachable or unable to be moved remained in the open, subject to the uncertain whims of the July elements. As one surgeon unhappily recalled, “No written nor expressed language could ever picture the field of Gettysburg! Blood! blood! And tattered flesh! Shattered bones and mangled forms almost without the semblance of human beings!” Based upon years of firsthand research, Coco’s A Vast Sea of Misery introduces readers to 160 of those frightful places called field hospitals. It is a sad journey you will never forget, and you won’t feel quite the same about Gettysburg once you finish reading.

"The present work, a product of six years of research using primary sources of the 1840s, 1850s, and 1860s, focuses on the pharmacopoeias, medical dictionaries, textbooks, scientific journals, and lectures available to doctors and medical students of the time -- what physicians caring for soldiers in the war knew, and when they knew it. The book also looks at how medical conditions encountered by the Civil War surgeon were treated then, how those entities would be treated now, and when knowledge leading to current therapies became available"--Introd.

This work tells the story of Samuel Hollingsworth Stout, an innovative Confederate doctor and medical director of the Army of Tennessee, and his successful administration and establishment of more than sixty mobile military hospitals scattered throughout the western theatre.