Junius and Albert's Adventures in the Confederacy by Peter Carlson

Author:Peter Carlson [Carlson, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781610391559
Publisher: PublicAffairs

RICHARDSON AND BROWNE observed the horrors of Salisbury Prison up close, but they did not suffer the worst of them. They weren’t living in a hole in the ground or struggling to survive on a cup of uncooked cornmeal a day. They still occupied a room on the third floor of one of the prison’s smaller buildings, and they were frequently able to supplement the meager prison rations by purchasing food with money that Luke Blackmer and other sympathetic outsiders smuggled in. Neither their food nor their quarters were luxurious, but compared to the cold, starving men they saw every day, they were living like pashas, and that knowledge filled them with guilt. But what could they do—invite 9,000 men to sleep in their room or share their extra potato or slice of bacon?

Browne, Richardson, and Davis volunteered to work in the prison hospitals, and the overworked head surgeon, Dr. Richard Currey, eagerly accepted their offer. The “hospitals” were merely a series of rooms in several buildings where sick men could get out of the elements and sleep inside, on floors carpeted with dirty straw. Six hundred men packed the hospitals’ floors, many of them too weak to get up and hobble to a latrine. The smell was horrendous and the air reverberated with the constant staccato cacophony of hacking and coughing.

Richardson became the hospital clerk, interviewing every new patient and recording his name, regiment, hometown, and diagnosis. He also recorded the daily death toll, and he was given the gruesome task of distributing the dead men’s clothing to prisoners desperate for any garment, no matter how foul.

Davis, the Cincinnati Gazette reporter, became the “general superintendent” of the hospitals, distributing supplies and helping Currey take care of the patients. Assisting him was Thomas E. Wolfe, a Connecticut sea captain, who’d been captured by the Rebel navy.

Browne became a kind of visiting nurse, taking water and medicine to the “outdoor patients”—the thousands of sick prisoners who couldn’t fit into the hospitals, or refused to enter them because nobody ever seemed to come out alive. Every day, he wandered the yard, asking prisoners to lead him to their sick friends, then crawling into crude tents and muddy holes to tend to them. He had only two medicines—one for diarrhea and one for coughs, neither very effective—so he couldn’t do much for the men. But he gave them water and medicine and he talked to them and tried to leave them with a little bit of hope.

The prisoners appreciated Browne’s efforts and called him “Doctor.” When they asked what kind of doctor he was, he identified himself, in his usual droll fashion, as an “amateur physician,” and the phrase quickly spread through the prison grapevine. One day, a prisoner asked Richardson what kind of college an “amateur physician” attended—they seemed to know a lot more than the average doctor.

That was a rare moment of levity in a grim autumn. The faces of dead and dying men haunted Richardson and Browne, and they were tormented by their inability to save the sick from a future in the burial trenches.

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