I must bear my most emphatic testimony to the zeal, manliness, and
professional spirit and capacity, generally prevailing among the
surgeons, many of them young men, in the hospitals and the army. I will
not say much about the exceptions, for they are few; (but I have met
some of those few, and very incompetent and airish they were.) I never
ceas'd to find the best men, and the hardest and most disinterested
workers, among the surgeons in the hospitals. They are full of genius,
too. I have seen many hundreds of them and this is my testimony. There
are, however, serious deficiencies, wastes, sad want of system, in the
commissions, contributions, and in all the voluntary, and a great part
of the governmental nursing, edibles, medicines, stores, &c. (I do not
say surgical attendance, because the surgeons cannot do more than human
endurance permits.) Whatever puffing accounts there may be in the papers
of the North, this is the actual fact. No thorough previous preparation,
no system, no foresight, no genius. Always plenty of stores, no doubt,
but never where they are needed, and never the proper application.
Of all harrowing experiences, none is greater than that of the days
following a heavy battle. Scores, hundreds of the noblest men on earth,
uncomplaining, lie helpless, mangled, faint, alone, and so bleed to
death, or die from exhaustion, either actually untouch'd at all, or
merely the laying of them down and leaving them, when there ought to be
means provided to save them.