Recollections of a Civil War Medical Cadet: Burt Green Wilder

By The Kent State University Press

The position of medical cadet was created by Congress in 1861 in response to volunteer army mass mobilization and the sudden need to treat vast numbers of sick and wounded soldiers. Directly assigned to an army surgeon, a cadet's primary purpose was to dress wounds in army general hospitals and, while in the field, serve as an ambulance attendant. The term of service was set at one year, and medical cadets were accorded officer-equivalent rank and pay level equal to that of West Point cadets. While some medical education background was required by law, the urgent need for hospital attendants combined with the predictable shortage of qualified candidates led to the acceptance of individuals with no prior medical training.

One of these promising yet entirely inexperienced inductees was Bostonian college graduate Burt Green Wilder. His outstanding memoir of his time spent as a medical cadet at an army general hospital in Washington, D.C. was recently published by Kent State University Press under the title Recollections of a Civil War Medical Cadet (edited by Richard Reid*).

In the summer of 1862, Burt Green Wilder had just completed a degree in anatomy and physiology at Harvard's Lawrence Scientific School. Faced with the decision of either joining the army or trying to make use of his scientific background in the medical service, he chose the latter and applied for a medical cadet position. Glowing faculty recommendations convinced hard-pressed authorities to waive the medical training requirement, and Wilder was duly appointed (along with his friend James Adams) medical cadet at Washington's Judiciary Square Hospital.

Wilder used his retirement years to write prolifically about many different aspects of his life and career. He started composing his cadet memoir in 1910. Wilder used his letters to then fiance Sarah Nichols as the basis of the memoir, but he didn't stop there. In order to both enhance his narrative and fill in various gaps, he incorporated wider research from a number of other sources, including friend and cadet colleague James Adams's diary. Excising all personal material, the result is a remarkably intimate and detailed account of the duties of a medical cadet serving at an army general hospital. In addition to being deeply informative, the memoir is composed in a lively and frequently charming manner that is a pleasure to read.

Helped along by his anatomical and scientific background, Wilder learned his medical functions quickly and his competence made him highly regarded by army surgeons and patients alike. Initial duties were similar to those of today's hospital nursing staff, but Wilder also proved to be very adept at administering surgical anesthetic and even conducted autopsies under physician supervision. He prepared specimens for the Army Medical Museum, and his exceptionally well-written case histories brought him to the attention of the planners of the Medical and Surgical History. Indeed, as his memoir demonstrates, Wilder had many interesting personal interactions with prominent Civil War medical figures like Dr. John Brinton and Surgeon General William Hammond.

In addition to being a highly useful historical record of the role of medical cadet in the army medical service, Wilder's memoir is an equally important contribution to the history of the Judiciary Square Hospital. Along with his personal portraits of various staff members, Wilder's remarkably detailed firsthand descriptions of the physical layout of the hospital, its patient care, and its day-to-day operation are invaluable.

Wilder's unpublished manuscript also includes a large number of interesting appendices. Some were written in defense of the operation of Judiciary Square Hospital, which came under fire later from Walt Whitman and others. Other topics in the appendix section include staff bios, supporting documents of all kinds, case studies, and other interesting ephe

• Language: English
• Publisher: The Kent State University Press
• Release date: Jul 25, 2017
• ISBN: 9781631012686

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RECOLLECTIONS

of a

CIVIL WAR MEDICAL CADET

CIVIL WAR IN THE NORTH

Broken Glass: Caleb Cushing and the Shattering of the Union · John M. Belohlavek

Banners South: A Northern Community at War · Edmund J. Raus

Circumstances are destiny: An Antebellum Woman’s Struggle to Define Sphere · Tina Stewart Brakebill

More Than a Contest between Armies: Essays on the Civil War · Edited by James Marten and A. Kristen Foster

August Willich’s Gallant Dutchmen: Civil War Letters from the 32nd Indiana Infantry · Translated and Edited by Joseph R. Reinhart

Meade’s Army: The Private Notebooks of Lt. Col. Theodore Lyman · Edited by David W. Lowe

Dispatches from Bermuda: The Civil War Letters of Charles Maxwell Allen, U.S. Consul at Bermuda, 1861–1888 · Edited by Glen N. Wiche

The Antebellum Crisis and America’s First Bohemians · Mark A. Lause

Orlando M. Poe: Civil War General and Great Lakes Engineer · Paul Taylor

Northerners at War: Reflections on the Civil War Home Front · J. Matthew Gallman

A German Hurrah! Civil War Letters of Friedrich Bertsch and Wilhelm Stängel, 9th Ohio Infantry · Translated and Edited by Joseph R. Reinhart

They Have Left Us Here to Die: The Civil War Prison Diary of Sgt. Lyle G. Adair, 111th U.S. Colored Infantry · Edited by Glenn Robins

The Story of a Thousand: Being a History of the Service of the 105th Ohio Volunteer Infantry in the War for the Union, from August 21, 1862, to June 6, 1865 · Albion W. Tourgée, Edited by Peter C. Luebke

The Election of 1860 Reconsidered · Edited by A. James Fuller

A Punishment on the Nation: An Iowa Soldier Endures the Civil War · Edited by Brian Craig Miller

Yankee Dutchmen under Fire: Civil War Letters from the 82nd Illinois Infantry · Translated and Edited by Joseph R. Reinhart

The Printer’s Kiss: The Life and Letters of a Civil War Newspaperman and His Family · Edited by Patricia A. Donohoe

Conspicuous Gallantry: The Civil War and Reconstruction Letters of James W. King, 11th Michigan Volunteer Infantry · Edited by Eric R. Faust

Johnson’s Island: A Prison for Confederate Officers · Roger Pickenpaugh

Lincoln’s Generals’ Wives: Four Women Who Influenced the Civil War—for Better and for Worse · Candice Shy Hooper

For Their Own Cause: The 27th United States Colored Troops · Kelly D. Mezurek

"Our Little Monitor": The Greatest Invention of the Civil War · Anna Gibson Holloway and Jonathan W. White

Recollections of a Civil War Medical Cadet · Burt Green Wilder, Edited by Richard M. Reid

RECOLLECTIONS

of a

CIVIL WAR MEDICAL

CADET

Burt Green Wilder

Edited by Richard M. Reid

The Kent State University Press   •   Kent, Ohio

© 2017 by The Kent State University Press, Kent, Ohio 44242

All rights reserved

ISBN 978-1-60635-328-8

Manufactured in the United States of America

Cataloging information for this title is available at the Library of Congress.

21  20  19  18  17      5  4  3  2  1

To

JAMIE SNELL,

a respected colleague, a life mentor,

and a close friend.

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

Introduction

RECOLLECTIONS OF A CIVIL WAR MEDICAL CADET

Burt Green Wilder

Notes

Index

ILLUSTRATIONS

Fig. 1. Map of Washington, 1862

Fig. 2. J. F. Alleyne Adams

Fig. 3. Sophronia Bucklin

Fig. 4. William A. Hammond

Fig. 5. Floor plan of Judiciary Square Hospital

Fig. 6. Sarah Milliken

Fig. 7. Ward in Judiciary Square Hospital

Fig. 8. Burt G. Wilder

Fig. 9. James R. May

Fig. 10. James H. Fowler

Fig. 11. Sarah Nichols

Fig. 12. Joseph T. Rothrock

Fig. 13. Elias J. Marsh

Fig. 14. Jimmy Noland

Fig. 15. Sketch of John Brinton’s office with Wilder’s desk

Fig. 16. Sketch of Wilder’s room at the Judiciary Square Hospital

Fig. 17. Jeffries Wyman

Fig. 18. Floor plan of a ward in the Judiciary Square Hospital

Fig. 1. Map of Washington, 1862. (Map by Marie Puddister)

INTRODUCTION

Wilder’s Professional Career

BURT GREEN WILDER was an inveterate writer all of his life, as indicated by the size and diversity of his publications.¹ By the time he was planning his retirement from Cornell University in 1910, at the age of seventy, he was working on several manuscripts covering important parts of his life, which he planned to publish. Although he never finished these projects, he left several virtually completed manuscripts dealing with his Civil War experiences, which form part of the extensive Burt Green Wilder Papers now held by the Cornell Library.² One of the manuscripts that he had worked on, but had not fully completed at the time of his death, drew on recollections of his service as a medical cadet in the Judiciary Square Hospital in Washington, D.C., where he worked in the second year of the war.³ He believed it was an important story to tell.

That Wilder was at the hospital at all was serendipitous. As he explained in his manuscript, in the summer of 1862 he faced a series of important personal decisions. Under the direction of Jeffries Wyman, he was about to finish his degree in anatomy and physiology at the Lawrence Scientific School of Harvard University; he was in debt; and he well understood the societal pressures on a healthy twenty-one-year-old man to join the Union army. At the same time, he believed he had neither the desire nor the aptitude to serve in the ranks as an infantryman. Despite this reluctance, however, he had already decided he would serve as a substitute for a friend, Edward Carter, if that person were drafted. Before that happened, a former student of Wyman, Dr. Francis H. Brown, who worked in the Judiciary Square Hospital in Washington but was home on leave, asked Wilder to join him as an acting medical cadet. Wilder agreed, in part because his close friend, James F. Alleyne Adams, had been offered a similar position at the hospital.

The critical demand for medical personnel as the war ground on into a second bloody year gave Wilder and Adams an opportunity to serve in the Washington hospital although neither man had the credentials officially required. Congress had created the medical cadet position in the summer of 1861, in response to the crisis created by mass mobilization and the growing ranks of sick and wounded soldiers. Although the duties and duration of the position were spelled out in the establishing legislation, like so many things in the war, practical needs soon outstripped theory. The act that established the position of medical cadet envisioned that the cadets would act as dressers in the general hospitals and as ambulance attendants in the field and would have the same rank and pay as the military cadets at West Point. Successful candidates would be men between the ages of eighteen and twenty-three who were of liberal education, students of medicine … who had been reading medicine for two years, and have attended at least one course of lectures in a medical college.⁴ The term of enlistment was set at one year. That the army prescribed a set of shoulder straps for medical cadets to be worn on an officer’s frock coat symbolized their expected position in the hierarchy of an army hospital.⁵

The Surgeon General’s Office was quickly convinced that medical cadets were an important addition to the medical personnel. In November 1861, Surgeon General Clement A. Finley claimed they were of great service in the fields and in the hospitals, increasing the efficiency of the medical department by an intelligent assistance. He recommended the addition of another fifty cadets to the corps.⁶ The cadets’ valuable role in the military hospitals, plus the serious shortage of trained medical attendants, explained the Medical Department’s willingness to accept men such as Wilder and Adams as acting medical cadets when they did not have the specified requirements but came well recommended.⁷

Wilder and Adams left Boston together and arrived in Washington on 15 July 1862. For the next ten months, Wilder served, first as an acting medical cadet and then, following his successful examination on 8 October 1862, as a regular medical cadet at the Judiciary Square Hospital. The hospital was one of the first midsize pavilion hospitals constructed in the city, and his posting to the hospital brought him into contact with many of the medical reforms being implemented by the Army Medical Department under the new surgeon general, William A. Hammond. Even though he had no formal medical training when he went to Washington, Wilder clearly showed aptitude, ability, and an advanced knowledge of anatomy in an environment that increasingly emphasized a scientific and systematic approach to the provision of medical care. He had received his comparative anatomy degree from Harvard summa cum laude and had given public lectures on a variety of natural history topics, two of which had been published.⁸ He arrived at the hospital just as the Medical Department began to focus on the production and dissemination of medical knowledge—writing of case histories, debating unfamiliar conditions, and providing support for medical writing and publication. It was an ideal environment for Wilder, and it undoubtedly influenced his future development. It was, however, the scientific rather than the medical component of his work that acted as a catalyst for his postwar career.

His talents were soon evident to Dr. John Brinton, a senior officer in the Medical Department, who was always looking for talented young men. The Washington meetings of the Army Medical Society, initially open only to army surgeons and senior medical officers, broadened its membership and welcomed interested medical cadets. Wilder first attended in December 1862 when he presented a patient with a right shoulder-blade curiously misplaced (41–42).⁹ Three weeks later, Brinton visited the Judiciary Square Hospital to inspect unusual medical cases, and, as Wilder recorded, he seemed much pleased that I was keeping an independent record of such cases in our ward (50). In late January, Brinton asked the young cadet if he would be willing to help with the early efforts to compile The Medical and Surgical History of the War of the Rebellion and assist in the creation of the United States Army Medical Museum.¹⁰ Wilder agreed, and for a brief period he was seconded from his hospital work to assist Brinton in the larger programs. Brinton had suggested that Wilder could be appointed as a contract surgeon, and Hammond had tentatively agreed to a contract of $100 per month. A month later and at a time that the army was trying to limit the use of contract surgeons, Brinton informed Wilder his contract would be for only $80. The young medical cadet saw it as a personal slight and was angry. When Hammond arrived at the office the following day and came over to Wilder’s desk, the latter snubbed him. Hammond, furious, left, and Wilder’s opportunity to work with Brinton was gone (60, 68, 73–74, 119). By April 1863, he was back at Judiciary Square Hospital.

A month later, Wilder’s father raised the possibility with him of applying for a commission with the 54th Massachusetts, a black infantry regiment being formed in that state. As a result, in the early summer of 1863 when the surgeon general of Massachusetts, William Dale, offered him a commission as the assistant surgeon in the 55th Massachusetts, the second black regiment raised, Wilder seized on the opportunity. In the middle of May, Wilder left Washington for Boston, and for the remainder of the war he served with the 55th, first as an assistant surgeon and then as the regimental surgeon.¹¹ Although after the war he would complete a medical degree at Harvard, he never practiced medicine. Instead, after working briefly at the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology, he applied for and was appointed professor of zoology at the Cornell University in the fall of 1867.¹² He would teach there for more that forty years and become a nationally important neurologist.¹³

DRAFTING HIS RECOLLECTIONS

In 1910, when Wilder began to compose his recollections of what life had been like at Judiciary Square, he relied heavily but not solely on the frequent letters that he had written to Sarah C. Nichols, to whom he became engaged in October 1862. After removing virtually all of the personal material, he incorporated large parts of those letters, which she had kept, into his draft. As a result, for the most part, his manuscript reads like a personal recollection of the conflict. Unfortunately, for most of his first four months at the hospital he had few or no letters to Nichols that he could incorporate into his manuscript, so he was forced to turn to other sources to augment his recollections. Fortunately, Adams had kept a personal diary beginning in July 1862, when the men left for Washington. Wilder was able to borrow the diary from the Adams family and use entries from it to cover the period for which he had few or no letters. He incorporated Adams’s entries into his recollections (always noting them with an A and placing them in quotation marks) from 21 July until Wilder’s successful examination as a regular medical cadet in October. When his recollections of the events of the time differed from what Adams had recorded, Wilder noted it and he frequently expanded on Adams’s entries. In addition, Wilder, as editor, often included comments or analysis from the perspective of an aging veteran looking back at his wartime service. When he did so, he was scrupulous in putting this material in parentheses. The result was an account that contained elements of both the present and the retrospective voice.

As he put together his recollections, Wilder was always concerned that his portrayal of life at the hospital be as accurate and complete a depiction of conditions there as possible. As a result, as he worked on his manuscript, he attempted to augment the personal records with a wide range of other sources, both private and public. He made several research trips to Washington after he retired to examine military and hospital records. During his time in the city, he got access to the Judiciary Square Hospital ward books from the Army Medical Museum, and he used them extensively while writing his manuscript. In addition, he wrote to fellow doctors about events he had not witnessed and he also corresponded with former patients with whom he had developed personal friendships. In some cases, he was able to persuade the Pension Bureau to give him the addresses of former patients who could provide him with more information.

Fig. 2. J. F. Alleyne Adams had just turned eighteen when he and Wilder joined the Judiciary Square hospital staff. (Courtesy of the Burt Green Wilder Papers, #14-26-95, Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library.)

Always an avid reader, as he began to compile his recollections, Wilder sought out material on the war written by fellow veterans. He was particularly sensitive to published or private accounts dealing with the Judiciary Square Hospital or Civil War medical practices that differed significantly from his own experiences. Wilder was clearly attempting to create an honest and accurate depiction of conditions in the hospital during the time he worked there. At the same time, he clearly was proud of the work being done at the hospital and he was surprised and stung by any criticism he uncovered. As a result, when he came across depictions of the hospital that were much more negative than his own accounts, Wilder made great efforts to understand and explain the differing perceptions of conditions in the hospital.

For this reason, during the period he was working on his recollections, he corresponded with people whom he thought could verify, challenge or elaborate on some of the issues raised by critics of the hospital. Of all of the critical accounts he collected, the one that elicited the greatest response from him came from a man who had served briefly as a civilian contract nurse in August 1862. The man, James Fowler, served for only a short time at the hospital, but perhaps because they were acquaintances prior to the war Wilder took the civilian nurse’s criticisms of the hospital very seriously.¹⁴ Shortly after he left the hospital, Fowler had written an account of life at Judiciary Square entitled The Brief Experience of a Christian Nurse that was very critical of conditions there. Wilder’s response as he prepared his recollections was to create three appendixes to cover and make understandable (in his own mind at least) Fowler’s depiction of life in the hospital.¹⁵

Because, Wilder claimed, "the form of contract under which he and others were employed during the Civil War is not included in the ‘Regulations,’ he reproduced Fowler’s copy of the contract in one appendix.¹⁶ In a second appendix Wilder included an abridged version of Fowler’s Brief Experience that had been written shortly after Fowler left the hospital and preserved by his family. Fowler’s son had loaned his copy to Wilder. Because he felt that Fowler’s account of his experiences at the hospital was too long and written in haste, Wilder edited Fowler’s work. While he made sure to include the unfavorable comments, he changed the order in a few cases and made some additions in brackets and notes. Wilder also drafted a third appendix, in which he tried to contextualize Fowler’s criticisms of the hospital by describing him as refined and sensitive, mentally and physically unfitted for the duties—always arduous and often disgusting—of an army hospital nurse. In addition, Wilder noted that Fowler’s brief service at the hospital was the most trying period of our service, when we were overwhelmed with wounded from Rappahannock Station and the Second Bull Run.¹⁷ While Fowler may have seen aspects of the hospital that Wilder did not, certainly conditions in the hospital improved over time.¹⁸

In an attempt to see if other health care workers or patients at the hospital shared Fowler’s critical assessment of the administration of the institution, Wilder published a letter in the National Tribune in 1914 outlining Fowler’s concerns. He asked for feedback from any former inmates of the hospital concerning the issues of hospital management and the quality of food provided. The only responses Wilder apparently received were from two patients who entered the hospital after Fowler had resigned and with whom Wilder had developed friendships. Both men’s memories of conditions in the hospital were much more positive than that of Fowler. The testimonies of Maj. Oscar Weil and Capt. Joseph Rothrock are included as part of the third appendix dealing with Fowler.¹⁹

Significantly, Wilder did not use, or perhaps had not read, Sophronia E. Bucklin’s In Hospital and Camp, an account of her service as an army nurse in various general and field hospitals during the war published in 1869. The book included two chapters that described Bucklin’s brief service at Judiciary Square Hospital in the fall of 1862, a short time after Fowler had left.²⁰ In many ways, her experiences are similar to those of Fowler. She found the work tiring and emotionally draining and the food poor. She remembered that her first dinner at the hospital consisted of a leg of beef, not very well dressed, dry beans, and bread in which the grit set my teeth on edge. The Potomac water furnished our beverage. Supper was no improvement, consisting of the same dark, dirty bread, with dried apple sauce, and tea which was black with strength. ²¹ Like Fowler, she also found frustrating the enforced hierarchy of the army hospital, which made it difficult for any nurse, male