Review of John H. Brinton. Memoirs of John H. Brinton: Civil War Surgeon, 1861-1865 (original) (raw)
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Contents 1. Return of Surgeon’s Equipment 2. Clothing for Dr. Lewis Howell, 2d New Jersey Regiment, 1778 3. “The sufferings of the wounded were extreme …”: Accounts of Wounded and Dead Soldiers, During and After a Battle, Saratoga Campaign, Northern New York, 1777 4. Diary of Albigence Waldo, Surgeon, 1st Connecticut Regiment, 1777-1778 5. “I dressd 17 or 18 Men. Wounded in different Parts …”: Jonathan Todd’s 1777 Accounts of Peekskill Garrison Life and Advancing with the Attack at Germantown 6. “Proceeded to amputate whenever the patient would consent to the operation”: Volunteer Surgeon William Read at the Battle of Monmouth, June 1778 7. “I am in hopes With the Assistance of god that I Shall git wel again”: New Jersey Private Henry Johnson is Wounded at the Battle of Connecticut Farms, 7 June 1780 8. “I Lay sick all night on the Ground": Massachusetts Sergeant Andrew Kettell’s Illness on Campaign, June/July 1780 9. “A cannonball having passed through both his thighs …”: Surgeon James Thacher at the Battle of Springfield, June 1780 10. “I assisted in amputating a man s thigh.”: A Surgeon’s Experiences during the Siege of Yorktown, 1781 11. “Their wounded … were no more fortunate than ours.”: Hospital Conditions in and near at Williamsburg, Virginia, after the Yorktown Siege, 1781 12. “Litters were exceedingly wanted for the wounded Men.”: Carrying Wounded from the Battlefield, 1759 to 1781 13. Surgeons’ Diaries, War for American Independence
“Small Things Forgotten: The Welchman and the Eel, and an Officer’s Grievous Wound”
As with another small work on soldiers and books, the appended excerpt was gleaned from the two-volume set by Joseph Lee Boyle's two-volume set, "'He loves a good deal of rum ...': Military Desertions during the American Revolution, 1775-1783" ((vol. 1, 1775-June 30, 1777; vol. 2, June 30, 1777-1783). (See “Small Things Forgotten: Soldiers and Reading During the War of the American Revolution” https://www.academia.edu/125865236/\_Small\_Things\_Forgotten\_Soldiers\_and\_Reading\_During\_the\_War\_of\_the\_American\_Revolution\_) Among the wonderful details I discovered in mining Boyle's compiled advertisements are soldiers with speech affects, men who were known for playing the fiddle or violin, a man known for his singing and dancing, and an Irish soldier with "his face good [sic] deal bruised by fighting on St. Patrick’[s] Day last." Some of the deserter advertisements are small vignettes, even short stories or at least the basis for one; this is one of those minor tales. Not much, but still, it brings us close to the entertaining conversations, or babble, that erupted among comrades and mess groups. First, the entire notice, in which every man is given some measure of a narrow biography, akin to the “backstory” an actor might give to a character he or she is portraying. Most interesting, those personal depictions show the writer’s close knowledge and observance of each deserter, something certainly not evident in most such notices.
‘Sticking It’: Resilience in the Life-Writing of Medical Personnel in the First World War
The First World War and Health, 2020
The pattern of war is shaped in the individual mind by small individual experiences, and I can see these things as clearly today as if they had just happened.1 In his memoir, The Gates of Memory (1981), published over sixty years after his service as a Medical Officer in the Great War, Geoffrey Keynes emphasises that personal remembrance of care-giving near the front lines is not due to any grand narrative but to quotidian and simple details that remain indelible and distinct even against the passage of time. In opening 'the gates of memory', Keynes performs a kind of witnessing, one which is central to the letters, diaries and memoirs of other medical personnel written during and after 1914-1918. In laying bare their experiences, often in graphic terms, medical accounts by men and women bear witness to the suffering of the multitude of soldiers they treated. Such bearing witness might also be read as a form of atonement for the inability to save so many, and perhaps at times as a remembering that is also a memorial. As Keynes admits in understated terms characteristic of much medical writing: ' "doing our best" was often distressingly inadequate.'2 Since medical care in war zones positions personnel as both witnesses to and participants in the carnage of war nowhere, arguably, is the relationship 1 Geoffrey Keynes, The Gates of Memory (Oxford, The Clarendon Press, 1981), p. 138. 2 Keynes, p.128.