Booknotes: The Confederate Navy Medical Corps

New Arrival:

• The Confederate Navy Medical Corps: Organization, Personnel and Actions by Guy R. Hasegawa (McFarland, 2024).

Guy Hasegawa, PharmD has authored or edited a number of important contributions to the scholarly study of Civil War medicine. Those prior works include: Years of Change and Suffering: Modern Perspectives on Civil War Medicine (2009, co-edited with Jim Schmidt), Mending Broken Soldiers: The Union and Confederate Programs to Supply Artificial Limbs (2012), and Matchless Organization: The Confederate Army Medical Department (2021). Another book, Villainous Compounds: Chemical Weapons and the American Civil War (2015), somehow escaped me, but it sounds very interesting. Stylistically similar to Matchless Organization is his newest project The Confederate Navy Medical Corps: Organization, Personnel and Actions. This study is "the first devoted entirely to the medical corps of the Confederate navy, provides a carefully researched look at the men, structure, facilities, and activities of the organization."

More from the description: "The Confederate Navy's medical service is usually overlooked in histories of the Civil War, yet it was vital in maintaining the fighting strength of the South's navy and marine corps. Confederate medical officers not only manned war vessels, they staffed navy yards and land-based hospitals, gathered supplies, participated in raids, examined recruits, and even served at defensive shore batteries. Many such officers had served in the United States Navy, while others were recruited from civil life. Enlisted personnel and civilian physicians also helped the navy provide medical care--used in managing battle wounds and other injuries but more often devoted to preventing and treating disease. Malaria was particularly common among sailors and marines stationed in the swampy regions of the South."

Topics of discussion include recruitment, organization, stewards (drawn from the enlisted ranks) and their services, the range of assignments, hospitals, hospital ships, treatments of diseases common to naval service, and more. Placed in the appendix section is an annotated and "complete list of men known to have been commissioned as naval medical officers" and a regulations excerpt covering the duties of medical officers.