Only edition of the most substantial medical text issued by the Surgeon General's Office of the Confederate Army and the only extensively-illustrated Confederate surgical manual. Plates illustrate amputations, resections and other operations required of the battlefield surgeon. Small and portable for use at the battlefront, which may explain why it's stained. Rare. Crandall, Confederate Imprints, 1057. Garrison-Morton 7736. The author, Samuel Preston Moore of Charleston, South Carolina, graduated from the Medical College of the State of South Carolina in 1834 and quickly became assistant surgeon for the United States Army in 1835. This position required service in several frontier regions of the country, including Missouri, Kansas, Florida, and the Texas-Mexico border. While serving in the Mexican War (1846-48), Moore met the future President of the Confederacy, Jefferson Davis, who was quite impressed with his organizational and disciplinary abilities. However, like many Southern officers in the United States Army, he was in crisis at the brink of the Civil War. When his home state of South Carolina seceded, he resigned his post in the U.S. army and moved to Arkansas to open a private practice and to avoid fighting against a country he had devoted so much of his life to. However, he began receiving personal requests from Jefferson Davis to join the Confederate army. Davis descriptions of the armys unfortunate military situation and the lack of trained medical men eventually persuaded Moore to become surgeon-general in 1861, a position he would hold for the duration of the war.
