Francis M. Wafer: A Surgeon in the Army of the Potomac (review)

Medicine is one of the most under-researched sub-fields of Civil War history. For whatever reason, scholars of the period have traditionally avoided detailed discussions of medical matters even while acknowledging that far more soldiers died in hospital beds than on battlefields. Our understanding of the war has suffered as a result, which is why the title of Francis M. Wafer's first-hand account of his wartime experiences—A Surgeon in the Army of the Potomac—is so wonderfully tantalizing. But the book never quite lives up to its promising title. The handful of case studies it contains are overshadowed by its crisp descriptions of Union army life and the campaigns which took place in the east after 1862.

When the Civil War began, Francis Moses Wafer—the son of Irish Catholic Canadians—was studying medicine at Queen's University in his hometown of Kingston, Ontario. Eager to gain more clinical experience, Wafer volunteered to serve as a surgeon with the 108th New York Infantry and rendezvoused with the Army of the Potomac in the wake of its humiliating defeat at Fredericksburg. From a purely medical standpoint, it was a good time to enlist. Dr. Jonathan Letterman had recently improved the army's ambulance service and field hospital system and Surgeon General William Hammond was busy modernizing the Medical Department's moribund bureaucracy. Wafer's letters and memoirs, however, contain precious few references to the organization he worked for and focus instead on the Iliadic events that were unfolding around him on the battlefields of Virginia and Pennsylvania.

At Chancellorsville, he watched rebel shells sweep "through the woods thickly" and cut down trees before spending a lonely night in a jerry-built field hospital tending patients in the dark (pp. 22-24). His recollections of Gettysburg are a compendium of combat horrors: "One of our men was rolling on the ground in agony—a piece of shell having struck him in the hip. Lieut [A.D.J.] McDonald sprang to his feet—a ball having passed through his shoulder. Lieut [Robert] Evans rolled over in the agonies of death, shot in the brain" (p. 43) .

Students of medical history will be disappointed that these macabre observations are not followed by detailed descriptions of nineteenth-century anesthetic and surgical techniques. But Wafer was writing for his "immediate friends" rather than historians and knew that the former group would be loathe to read too many particulars (p. 3). Instead, he left them (and us) with a refreshingly-clean Canadian interpretation of America's defining historical moment, one free from the harsh prejudices contained in so many other first-hand accounts of the war. Having observed the North's and South's antebellum political contests from the neutral-ground of Ontario, Wafer never developed a deep-seated hatred for his Confederate enemies and was even able to praise them for their bravery in battle and compassion toward Union POWs (p. 29). In addition, his views on African Americans were enlightened by the standards of the time. After encountering a number of black troops at Petersburg, for example, he expressed admiration for "their soldierly appearance & discipline" and "gallant conduct under fire" (p. 126). Not all of Wafer's fellow Irishmen in blue would have agreed. A ballad popular among Irish-American units at the time enjoined listeners to let "Sambo be murthered instead of [whites] on every day in the year."

Editor Cheryl A. Wells deserves praise for writing an excellent introduction, carefully reconstructing Wafer's prose, and beginning each chapter with helpful summaries of the major events of the war. She and her subject share a command of the Queen's English—the result of their Canadian educations—which American audiences will find irresistible.