The Photographic History of The Civil War: in ten volumes, Thousands of Scenes Photographed 1861-65, with Text by many Special Authorities, Volume 7: Prisons and Hospitals.
Francis Trevelyan Miller, Ed.

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[246] Mississippi Department; Dr. J. R. Buist, of Nashville; Dr. William Brickell, of New Orleans; Dr. G. B. Thornton, medical director of Stewart's corps, and others. Dr. Hunter McGuire, medical director of General T. J. Jackson's corps, collected fifteen thousand cases of chloroform anesthesia without a single death.

As for dressings, there were a few cotton manufactories in the South that made a fairly good quality of osnaburg from which bandages were made, in some instances rolled by the hands of fair women, or the medical officers and hospital attendants. Many households furnished old sheets and other worn cotton and linen garments, lint being made from the latter by scraping with a knife in some Southern woman's hands. Raw cotton, however, carded by hand, and in some instances separated from its seeds by the fingers of women and children, baked in an oven, in fact almost charred, was often substituted for lint, being rendered aseptic by this means, although we knew little of asepsis and antisepsis in that part of the ‘Sixties.’ When sponges became scarce, old but clean linen or cotton rags were used and then thrown away or burned, another aseptic procedure, although at the time that special designation had not been given it. Occasionally, silk for ligatures and sutures was limited, but it was as easily transmitted by blockade or the ‘underground’ as were quinine and morphia; yet a few times I was forced to use cotton or flax thread of domestic make, and horse hair, boiled, to make it more pliant and soft—again accidental asepsis.

Water dressing for large wounds, amputations, resections, and extensive lacerations, was largely resorted to, by means of wet cloths applied from time to time, the nurse pouring small quantities on, or the automatic siphoning by means of a strip of cotton or linen, one end of which was immersed in a vessel of water suspended over the wound, the other hanging down a little lower than the bottom of the water. In that case a piece of oilcloth or part of an old piano cover was placed beneath the