Southern Historical Society Papers, Volume 29.
Reverend J. William Jones, Ed.

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[276] limited extent. To organize an efficient medical corps in such great emergency from unknown and scattered elements, became his first care. In this he found much difficulty from the fact that many of the most capable of the younger physicians, in the ardor of the time and from various causes, sought distinction in the ranks, and as officers of commands, in the hope of more rapidly acquiring military fame. And as was the case in the other departments, there was in this one, great lack of the requisite stores, raw and manufactured, for field and hospital. Severed in every direction from the rest of the world of supplies by powerful armies and fleets, and by the early proclamations of the enemy declaring all medicines and surgical instruments, books and appliances contraband of war, the medical department was constrained to seek in its own forests and fields such substitutes as could be found for the more reliable medicines, and to build and establish laboratories for converting them into pharmaceutical preparations in large quantities, and arrange them in convenient packages for wide distribution and use; to improvise and manufacture by unskilled artisans, and the scanty means at hand, such surgical instruments and appliances as their necessity required and ingenuity could invent, which could not be procured from the so-called underground railroad of the time, the occasional blockade runners, and the success of our brave soldiers in the field in capturing stores from the enemy, and to select appropriate sites and organize hospitals, etc. Such, in part, were the problems which fell to him to solve.