A Manual of Military Surgery, For the use of Surgeons in the Confederate States Army; With an Appendix of the Rules and Regulations of the Medical Department of the Confederate States Army

This rare Confederate imprint on medical care for wounded soldiers was first published in 1861. Dr. John J. Chisolm had experience witnessing care and treatment in multiple European conflicts and was able to transfer his knowledge to doctors serving in the Civil War. Note sections in this book on the ambulance corps in the French army, Crimean statistics, and the medical departments of the English and Prussian armies. Covering a typical soldier’s day-to-day life, this book and its later editions were reportedly the Confederate Army’s main source of information on military surgery.Having to build a medical corps from the ground-up, Dr. Chisolm contributed significantly to the war effort by working with and mentoring others at the Confederate capital of Richmond, Virginia. Additionally, he worked to counteract Union blockades by building medical laboratories, including the creation of a research and drug plant in Columbia, South Carolina. The plant was essential for the distribution of chloroform and ether, both used as competing forms of nineteenth-century anesthesia.Perhaps his most notable achievement was the invention of the Chisolm Inhaler. At the time, the most widely accepted method of the application of anesthesia was chloroform with a folded cloth. Chishom pioneered an ingeniously simple (and pocket-sized) applicator during the later stages of the Civil War. In this book he discusses the application of chloroform but he had not yet devised his invention. Some unintended humour lies in the chapter at rear called "Malingering" which describes those soldiers "who feign disease to escape military duty." Considering the horrors of war, it's hard not to sympathize with men trying to escape it. But Chisholm suspected that some men were "little disposed to give up their comforts and their habitual idleness for the active and laborious duties of camp life." He noticed that some men wished to feign a case of diarrhoea so much that "dystenteric stools have been actually stolen from neighboring patients to asist in carrying out the deception." The author recommends methods to determine whether a condition is real or faked, such as applying "a drop of turpentine or alcohol in the eye" of one apparently having an epileptic seizure as this might "bring his acting to a speedy close."