more on the mother lode

A short piece on the importance of the The Medical and Surgical History of the War of the Rebellion. it's by Ira Rutkow, from the Archives of Surgery 133 (7), 1998.

Of the numerous contributions to American health care that developed out of the horrors of the Civil War, one of the most significant, but least appreciated, was the accumulation of untold clinical records and detailed medical and surgical reports. For the first time in the history of the world, a complete profile of wartime medical activities was available for professional purview. The largest assemblage of these chronicles were published during a 2-decade period (1870-1888) as the 6-volume Medical and Surgical History of the War of the Rebellion, 1861-1865. Considered among the most remarkable works ever composed on military medicine and surgery, the text itself has been described accurately as the country's earliest comprehensive medical monograph. Containing thousands of pages of densely printed type, the 3 medical and 3 surgical volumes present a detailed overview of the health care conditions encountered by the Civil War physician/surgeon and his patients. As a statistical reservoir it is unmatched while its extensive discussions of clinical minutiae highlight the viewpoint of the technical medical mind of the mid 19th century.

Beginning with the introduction to the first surgical volume, the project's uniqueness is immediately apparent with an extensive listing of American books and papers on military surgery. In the next 120-plus pages, a chronological summary of the engagements and battles detailing Union and Confederate killed and wounded are enumerated. The surgical topics include every imaginable wartime injury, with extensive summaries of virtually all known cases. An index of "operators" is appended to the end of the third surgical volume and allows the Civil War activities of thousands of "surgeons" to be scrutinized, while learning about the specific patients they treated. So bureaucratic are some of these discussions that, for instance, the day-to-day duties of the "surgeon-in-chief of a division," "surgeon-in-chief of a brigade," "surgeon in charge of a division hospital," "operating surgeon," "regimental surgeon," and "assistant regimental surgeon," are methodically spelled out.

This masterpiece of 19th century American medicine and surgery was originally conceived by William Hammond (1828-1900), surgeon-general of the US Army, but was prepared under the direction of his successor Joseph K. Barnes (1817-1883). However, the actual writing and organizing of the text and illustrations were completed by David Huntington (1834-1899), George Otis (1830-1881), Charles Smart (1841-1905), and Joseph Woodward (1833-1884). The initial press run was 5000 copies and a second printing was of a similar size. Lavishly illustrated with more than 1000 engravings, hundreds of tinted lithographs primarily by Julius Bien after photographs by William Bell and E. J. Ward, and tens of chromolithographs after paintings by Herman Faber, the volumes are also historically important because they are among the earliest American medical books to be illustrated with mechanical photographs, in this case Woodburytypes by the American Photo-Relief Printing Co and heliotypes by Osgood & Co.