Doctor to the Front: The Recollections of a Confederate Surgeon

Military doctors labored through the smoke of battle where impossible conditions and fear of infection often forced them to resort to amputation, and most operations were performed without painkillers. Thomas Fanning Wood recorded his wartime experiences as a Confederate Army surgeon, and his recollections of those events allow us to hear a distinct voice of the Civil War. His narrative -- drawn from his memoirs, letters from the front, and articles written for his hometown newspaper -- presents a poignant and sometimes horrifying picture of what the Civil War physician had to face both under battlefield conditions and in urban hospitals. Wood himself spent much of his time at the front, and his vivid narrative describes both a doctor's daily activities and the campaigns he witnessed. He was present at many of the war's major engagements: he was near Stonewall Jackson when the general fell at Chancellorsville, manned a field dressing station at the foot of Culp's Hill at Gettysburg, and was one of the few survivors of the Union attack on the mule shoe at Spotsylvania when his entire division was wiped out. With its observations of medical care and training not found in standard histories of the war, Doctor to the Front offers a unique human perspective on the Civil War. $30.00