Booknotes: Gettysburg Surgeons

New Arrival:

• Gettysburg Surgeons: Facing a Common Enemy in the Civil War’s Deadliest Battle by Barbara Franco (Stackpole Bks, 2025).

The plight of the Gettysburg Campaign's wounded has been examined, to some degree or another, in innumerable books and articles. Barbara Franco's Gettysburg Surgeons: Facing a Common Enemy in the Civil War’s Deadliest Battle contributes to that expansive literature by focusing most closely on the physicians from both sides who were charged with the care of a veritable flood of torn bodies. From the description: "In the bloodiest battle of the Civil War, a thousand surgeons faced an unprecedented medical catastrophe: 25,000 wounded soldiers needing immediate care with only primitive tools and their own determination to save lives."

In field hospitals established all around the Gettysburg landscape, these surgeons struggled to keep up with the sheer volume of wounded. From dealing with all that human tragedy (at Gettysburg and elsewhere during the Civil War years), however, emerged invaluable experience and knowledge that facilitated a leap forward in developing improved treatments for physical trauma and in post-operative care. More: "At Gettysburg's makeshift hospitals—set up in barns, churches, and blood-soaked fields—military and civilian surgeons from both North and South worked around the clock performing life-saving operations under fire. Drawing from a decade of meticulous research, historian Barbara Franco reveals how these courageous medical professionals revolutionized battlefield medicine and established principles still saving lives today."

Expressed "(t)hrough vivid accounts and previously untold stories," major themes in Franco's study address: "(h)ow surgeons improvised new techniques that became standard trauma procedures," "(t)he harrowing reality of Civil War field hospitals during the three days of battle," "(h)ow lessons learned at Gettysburg transformed American military medicine," and "(t)he lasting impact on modern emergency and disaster response."

Franco's study is delivered in three parts. Part I delves at some length into background matters associated with Civil War surgeons, including their education, army recruitment, defined duties, and experiences in the field. The heart of the book is found in Part II's discussion of the many duties and responsibilities involved with caring for the wounded both during and after the three-day battle. Finally, Part III focuses on one of the least investigated aspects of a Civil War surgeon's career arc—the strain involved with returning to the civilian world after the war ended—those challenges relating to both finding success in professional practice postwar and maintaining personal health that was in many cases chronically impaired by their hospital service. Some abandoned medicine altogether, redirecting their primary energies toward business or political pursuits. For added reference value, a number of Union and Confederate surgeons are individually profiled in the appendix section.