"An incredible resource for anyone interested in the human experience of the Civil War―as recorded by a medical professional tasked with saving lives."—David Price, Executive Director of the National Museum of Civil War MedicineIn this never before published diary, twenty-nine-year-old surgeon James Fulton transports readers into the harsh and deadly conditions of the Civil War as he struggles to save the lives of the patients under his care. Fulton joined a Union ...

Nearly two-thirds of the Civil War’s approximately 750,000 fatalities were caused by disease — a staggering fact for which the American medical profession was profoundly unprepared. In the years before the war, training for physicians in the United States was mostly unregulated, and medical schools' access to cadavers for teaching purposes was highly restricted. Shauna Devine argues that in spite of these limitations, Union army physicians rose to the challenges of the war, undertaking met...